by Don Winslow
“I know that girl,” Doc repeats, then gives it up and asks Stan, “So what do you think?”
Stan strokes his beard.
Black and bushy.
“I don’t know,” he says, studying the menu. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Diane asks, as if she hadn’t overheard the conversation in the van.
“Doc has a business proposition,” Stan says.
“You know,” Doc says. “Business.”
“Oh,” says Diane. “Business.”
“Should we be talking about this here?” Stan asks.
Diane is surprised that she feels contempt for him.
The waitress comes back for their orders.
She’s pretty, Diane thinks.
A cheerleader.
They all order omelets.
Diane sees Stan (sneakily) look at the girl’s tits.
“Do we know each other?” Doc asks the girl.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
You couldn’t describe the girl as bubbly, Diane thinks, but you wouldn’t call her cold, either.
She’s reserved.
Older than her age.
“I just think I know you from somewhere,” Doc says.
Kim thinks, maybe it’s because you used to sleep with my mother with me there, but she doesn’t say anything. If Doc doesn’t remember her, good. If no one remembers her, good.
“Jesus, will you let it go?” John mutters at Doc.
Kim remembers him, too.
The boy who lived in the cave and ignored her.
Stan watches her ass as she walks away, then says to Doc, “I don’t think we have the money to buy in.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Doc says. “You don’t have to. You just go down to Mexico, bring some back with you, and keep a piece for yourself. Sell that piece and you’re in business.”
“I don’t know . . .”
Doc leans over the table and says to Stan, “You could sell right out of the store. I’m telling you, this is money.”
“I don’t know,” Stan answers. “We’ll have to think about it.”
“Don’t think about it too long,” Doc says.
Cocaine doesn’t make you exactly patient.
Diane looks at John.
86
As they’re undressing for bed Stan asks, “So what do you think?”
“About the cocaine?”
“Yeah.”
Or about me kissing another man, Diane thinks. Nothing about that? We’re just going to let it slide? She tosses it back at him. “I don’t know, what do you think?”
“Do we want to be drug dealers?” he asks.
She knows that they can go on for hours like this, answering questions with questions with questions.
“We dealt grass,” she says; “is it so different?”
Stan unbuttons his denim shirt and hangs it up in the closet. Shucks off his jeans and hangs them on a hook on the back of the door. “Isn’t it? I mean, grass is natural—this is a powder.”
“That comes from a plant,” she says.
“So does heroin,” Stan counters. “Would we deal that?”
“No,” she says, impatient now, naked now, sliding into bed. “But is cocaine addictive?”
“I don’t know.” He gets in beside her. “It would be nice to have some money.”
“We could buy the house,” she says, thinking that if he says anything about “feminine nesting instincts” she’ll punch him in the face.
“But it’s drug dealing,” Stan says. “Is that what we started out to be?”
“What did we start out to be, Stan?”
To his credit, he laughs at his own pretension. “Revolutionaries.”
Volunteers of America.
“The revolution is over,” Diane says.
“Who won?” Stan asks.
Diane laughs and then takes him in her arms, pulls him close. His body is warm and familiar, and he gets hard quickly. She knows that he wants to slide into her, but she rolls over and straddles him.
He looks up at her, his eyes shining, and she can see him thinking.
“You saw me kissing him,” she says.
He nods.
“Did it turn you on?”
He doesn’t answer.
She hovers, supports herself on her thin, strong—surprisingly strong—arms, her cunt just on the head of his cock. “You can’t have it until you tell me. Tell me it turned you on, watching your wife kiss another man.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, it turned me on. Watching you.”
She lowers herself down on him and he moans. She rises and then drops again, and then she says, “I’ll fuck him and you fuck her.”
“Who?”
“‘Who?’” she mocks. “The Hitler Youth waitress you were ogling.”
She leans over, rocks on him, and whispers, “I’m fucking him and you’re fucking her. You’re fucking her sweet little blonde cunt, you’re feeling her tits, her ass . . .”
Stan grabs her by the waist and turns her over. Pulls her up onto her knees and plunges into her. Uncharacteristically, ungently, he pounds her, bruises her ass and the back of her thighs.
“That’s right,” she says. “Take her. She wants you to just take her. That’s right, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right . . .”
Then she feels him go soft.
“I just . . .” he says. “I just want you.”
Like the sex narcs are watching you, she thinks.
Later, he says, “I’ll talk to Doc in the morning.”
87
Diane sips her coffee and looks out the window.
At John’s house.
She pretends to vacillate, but she already knows what she’s going to do. Diane’s too honest to fool herself for long. Too honest not to acknowledge that she now feels justified by jealousy over Stan’s easy acquiescence to her manipulation, fantasy-fucking the teenage waitress, then unable to carry it all the way through.
Setting the cup on the counter, she walks out the door.
Warm spring morning.
Knocks on John’s door.
It seems like forever before he answers, but then he opens the door. His hair is sleep-tousled, his denim shirt unbuttoned.
Barefoot.
A cup of coffee in his hand.
“Hi,” he says.
88
Stan and Doc meet at the Harbor Grill.
Kim is their waitress.
“Do you ever go home?” Doc asks her.
“I wanted extra shifts.”
Charles Jourdans.
$150.00.
Money she isn’t going to make no matter how many extra shifts she works. She takes their order and goes to the kitchen.
“Have you thought it over?” Doc asks.
“Diane and I talked about it,” Stan says.
“And?”
Stan hesitates.
He’s more than aware of Diane’s (irrational, unfair) contempt for him. She despises him for not wanting to have sex with another woman? Not even a woman, but a teenage girl?
It’s crazy, but he does feel emasculated.
He knows that money would make it better, money would give him his balls back, the kind of money Doc is talking about . . .
“We’re going to say no,” Stan says.
“That’s cool,” Doc says.
Stan can see he thinks it’s anything but cool.
He thinks it’s pussy.
But Stan has weighed the pros and cons. The money would be great, but you have to weigh it against the risk of getting busted, spending years in prison, maybe a Mexican prison, and then there are the ethical issues . . .
“Not that we don’t appreciate the offer,” Stan says.
“Sure,” Doc says.
The waitress brings their food and they eat pretty much in silence, with forced, desultory conversation.
Doc is relieved when
Stan gets up and says he has to open the store.
“I’ve got the check,” Doc says.
“No, let me—”
“Nah, I got it.”
Stan thanks him and leaves.
The waitress comes over with the check, lays it on the table, and says, “I’ll do it.”
“I’m sorry—what?”
“I’ll do it,” Kim says. Just one time, but—
I’ll do it.
89
“She’s a fucking kid,” John says.
“You were a fucking kid.”
“It’s different.”
“How?”
“That was grass,” John says. “This is coke. That’s hard time.”
Doc shakes his head. “It’s juvenile time. Worst that can happen is that she does a few months in juvie.”
Doc knows this, for chrissakes—he did time in the juvenile system. He also knows that she may go in a kid, but she won’t come out one. Between the girl gangs and the dykes, she’ll be just a piece of white meat.
“She asked me,” Doc says defensively. “I didn’t ask her. Anyway, I remember who she is.”
“That’s great,” John says. He doesn’t ask, he doesn’t care.
“You remember Freaky Frederica?” Doc asks.
“No.”
“When you were living in a fucking cave, hotshot?” Doc prompts. “That was her little girl.”
John doesn’t remember her.
“She’ll look just like any other teenager with a fake ID,” Doc says. “She’ll bat those blue eyes and walk right through.”
“Yeah?” John asks. “What if she doesn’t, Doc? What if she gets popped? You think she’s going to keep her mouth shut and do her time? She’ll give us up in a heartbeat.”
Worse, he thinks, is that we won’t know it. They’ll tape that coke back up to her and let her bring it right to us.
With an escort of narcs.
Doc’s ahead of him. “Our Mexican suppliers will clock her through the border check. If she doesn’t go right through, we go straight to the airport, cool out in Tahiti for a while.”
And the girl, John thinks, what’s her name . . .
Kim?
. . . can cool out in juvie.
Nice.
90
Kim walks toward the border check
like any number of American teenagers who go to Tijuana for a day of drinking and then come back to San Diego over the pedestrian bridge at the San Ysidro crossing.
Medical tape is wrapped around her rib cage, holding the bags of cocaine firmly under her breasts. Slimmer, smaller packets—still valuable—are taped to the insides of her thighs.
She had stood, humiliated, in her bra and panties inside a house while the Mexican abuelas taped the packets to her body. Mentally, she removed herself from the scene, trying not to feel their hands on her, or the eyes of the drug trafficker who stared at her with undisguised lust.
I am a princess, she told herself, being prepared for a ball
No
I’m a high-fashion model and they are fussing over last-minute details before I go out on the runway, and the man is
A photographer, studying how he can best capture my beauty, my
essence for his camera, and finally
they were done and she pulled the loose-fitting peasant blouse over her head and slipped back into the jeans and the women stroked and patted her until they were satisfied that the packets could not be seen or even easily felt, and then she put on her tennis shoes and hefted the cheap canvas bag over her shoulder.
Doc told her that most kids might slip a couple of joints or a bag of cheap ditch weed into the bottom of their bags, and that’s what the customs guys will be looking for.
“If they search anything, they’ll search the bag,” Doc said. “When they see that it’s clean, they won’t do a body search.”
Say what you will about Doc, he makes the kids go to school.
The leering drug trafficker drove her out near the border crossing, and now she walks toward the checkpoint and tries to control her fear.
The truth is she’s terrified.
Despite Doc’s reassurances.
“You won’t get caught,” he said, “but if you do, you’ll spend a few weeks—maybe—in juvenile hall.”
Now in the pedestrian line at the checkpoint she balances a few weeks in juvenile hall against the pair of Charles Jourdans and tells herself that she made the right choice, but she’s still frightened and knows that’s a bad thing.
“They look for signs of nerves,” Doc told her. “Sweating, fidgeting. Whatever you do, don’t touch yourself, like, to make sure the packets are still in place. They will be. Keep your hands away from your body. Just act natural.”
(Doc doesn’t know
Kim doesn’t know
that she’s spent her entire life so far
trying not to act
natural.
Nature is a cave
Nature is dirty.)
Now there are only two people in front of her. She shifts her weight onto one hip, posturing a teenager’s impatience.
“If you get caught,” Doc said, “which you won’t, they’ll ask you who gave you the drugs. Just say that some Mexican guys approached you on the street and offered you money and you couldn’t resist the temptation.”
“How much money?” Kim, always pragmatic, asked.
“Five hundred dollars,” Doc said.
They were going to meet you at the trolley stop at the main train station in San Diego. You were going to go into the ladies’ room stall, give the dope to a woman there, and get paid.
Now she rehearses the story in her head.
Some Mexican men came up to me on Avenida Revolución. One of them was named Miguel. He offered me five hundred dollars. That’s so much money—I’m a waitress. I went into the bathroom of a restaurant with his girlfriend—I think she said her name was Rita—and she taped the drugs to me. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I’ve never done anything like this. I’ll never do it again, I swear. Ever.
Only one person ahead of her now.
She feels her heart race.
She thinks about turning around, going back.
Then the customs agent waves her forward.
91
Doc hangs up the receiver of the pay phone on Ocean Avenue and walks back into the Marine Room.
John sits at the bar, nursing a beer and idly watching the baseball game on television.
“She’s in line,” Doc says.
His tone is cool, but John can tell that Doc is
nervous.
92
Stan and Diane sit in their small living room.
Reading.
He Updike, she Cheever.
She looks up from her book and says,
“I fucked John McAlister.”
93
The customs officer tells Kim to set her bag on the table and open it.
He watches her, not the bag, as she does.
And sees
Nothing.
The girl is totally calm
unconcerned.
Aloof, detached.
He looks into the bag and sees
the strand of Kotex that Doc provided her with, told her to put on top.
Kim looks at the customs officer coolly, as if to say
Hey, you told me to open it.
He hands her the bag and welcomes her back to the United States.
She crosses the bridge.
94
Kim walks into the shop and asks to try on the Charles Jourdans.
The clerk looks at her in her pink waitress uniform with that “You’re wasting my time” look, but something in Kim’s eyes makes her go find a pair of 51/2s and bring them out.
Kim makes her bring out 5s and 6s, too, just to be sure, but the 51/2s fit
perfectly
and Kim says she’ll take them.
The clerk takes the shoes to the counter and asks for a credit card.
Kim pays cash.
God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.
95
Tía Ana dresses her.
For she knows not what
But
the girl is beautiful.
No, not beautiful—
Exquisite.
96
For a week, Stan says nothing about Diane’s announcement.
He’s sly enough to know that this seeming indifference is the best revenge, the harshest way to punish her, to inflict retaliatory pain, to pretend that her infidelity
isn’t important enough to merit discussion, and besides,
he doesn’t know what to say, having already confessed that her kissing John turned him on, and also, the truth of it is—
he’s afraid to talk about it
Afraid of the confrontation igniting a
conflagration
that might end in his having to demand a divorce
(What if she doesn’t apologize? What if she says she’s going to do it again? With John? With other men? What if she demands an “open marriage”?)
which he doesn’t want.
So Stan pretends that his silence is a punishment and Diane pretends to believe the same, although she’s pretty sure that—
He’s actually afraid, and it deepens her
Contempt, which tempers her
shame
Not so much that she cheated on her husband, but the fact that she bestowed herself on John, who didn’t seem to think it was such a
Big deal.
They did it, and it was nice, it was good, but it was nothing special, and afterward he got up and got a beer and offered her one (she declined) and he didn’t ask “What now” or “What next” and she just went home and washed him out of herself and couldn’t avoid the truth that she betrayed Stan for
nothing
and then Stan decided to punish her with silence, which was so stupid because couldn’t he see that she’d done it largely to give them