by Richard Ford
The boy in the neutral corner began to survey the crowd casually. His handlers were talking fast and counting off something on their fingers that the boy was apparently supposed to hear but didn’t. He looked bemused, and he worked his mouthpiece and his knees automatically as if he expected the fight to start again but didn’t care when. His eyes were fixed, and his face looked calm. He seemed to be thinking about something far away. Suddenly he waved his glove at the men who were counting, turned toward the ring, and ran and hit the injured boy again flush in the face, knocking him off his knees onto his side, and began dancing around the center of the canvas holding his arms up. The referee started waving his arms, and the Italian girl out of instinct was moving away from where she was, straight into the men beside her, saying “con permiso, con permiso,” and then a folding chair hit the air and the crowd began screaming, and police appeared, pushing toward the ring, and Quinn knew he had to get out. He couldn’t risk police, and he began shoving the girl through the crowd toward where he thought a door was, trying to get himself back into the night before something worse happened and before he had pissed away everything.
In the bungalow the girl wanted to do everything, as though going to the fights had been her bad idea for a good time and not his, and she wanted to put it right. She took off her clothes in the living room without talking, took a lude, then got on her knees beside the davenport and licked him down his legs and up his chest and his arms and blew him in an expert way that made him come fast. She drank some mescal out of a bottle in her bolsa and took a crossroads, then walked him into the bedroom as though the house was hers and turned on the lights and sat on the side of the bed and looked like she wanted to apologize for something. She was a smaller girl with her clothes off, with turned-up breasts and thin legs. Her hair seemed thicker in the light, and when he got in bed with her she climbed on him and fucked him until she worked herself down into her pill and the mescal, down below whatever she’d seen in the boxing ring that was making her want to apologize. It hadn’t been what she bargained for, but he thought she was the kind of girl who made the most of things, and he admired her for it, though he had lost any philosophy that made it possible to feel sorry for her. When she was finished, she got off him and went to the bathroom, and came back with a wet cloth and wiped it over his legs, and in a little while she lay back on the pillow in the light and went to sleep.
At two o’clock he got out of bed, turned off the light and did pushups till his arms ached, then walked out onto the walled patio where he could see the city against the black Sierra and breathe the bougainvillea. In the war, this was scrounge time, when things got dicey. The incomings wasted you out of sleep, slammed your face in the dirt, clawing the deck for a flak vest and helmet. He didn’t want to be asleep at two o’clock anymore. He preferred to be alert to whatever there was to hear. The bungalow sat on a long, eucalyptus-shaded hill that humped back toward the big mountains north of town. It was the suburbs. Americans rented there because the bungalows were cheap and neat and had grassy lawns and no deposits were taken. But he didn’t know the American girls next door, and now that Rae was coming with the money, and the hard part was done and Sonny was coming out, he wouldn’t have the chance. He had begun, in a month of waiting and passing through offices and anterooms, and seven months living alone, to feel like he was losing a freedom of some kind, getting cautious without any gain back in precision. Bernhardt said it was the American experience abroad, the long decline in expectation until you could see the immediate world like a native, but without the native’s freedom. It should be a great unburdening, Bernhardt said, but to Americans it was always a hardship. Bernhardt thought Americans thrived on protecting privileges nobody else would ever want. Bernhardt liked explanations. It was a lawyer’s vice.
Oaxaca sparkled like a matrix of platinum sequins laid over velvet. The dark played out into the valley south toward Chiapas, so that where the land stopped and the sky began was a boundary lost to sight. He counted landmarks every night. The pink rotator on the airport tower, the blue Corona Cerveza on Bustamante, the hollow lights that shone all night on the cathedral opposite the zócalo, and the red Pepsi script shimmering far out in the Mixtec barrios beyond the river. There was never a sense of intimacy. The town seemed to function practically in the visible distance, though the empty air in between became enticing and silent and still. The American Highway curled down the mountains, split, circled the city two ways, then reunited, and the only detectable movement there was the lights of an overland truck gearing down before flatting out into the valley. Americans were off the road hours ago. The trucks and the Dinas would blink their lights, then run you off the cliffsides.
Quinn thought when you hung out in the present, which he did, you slipped free of the past, though not the future, and all the anxieties came in at higher calibers. It was why he liked fucking phony Italian girls from the Portal, and why he’d let Rae leave when she got ready. Too much future, too much anxiousness. In the present, he knew precisely how it would all feel every time: the contact, then the being alone, then somebody else coming in to fill up the space. That was manageable, and you felt lucky and not anxious, and when it wasn’t done right, like this time, it didn’t matter. Except for Rae. Rae had left a space he couldn’t quite manage anymore. And he’d come down for Sonny just to get Rae, since Rae seemed essential to the present, and since he was tired of being alone with himself. Efficiency only took you so far.
Her letter had said, “Dear Harry, No phone? Are you still up there protecting the animals in silence? If so, could you bear to protect one more? (That was my joke, though jokes aren’t your long suit.) I apologize for saying Sonny’s in trouble in Mexico. Needs money. Needs help. It’s me who needs protecting. Could you do this one? Could you, would you? I think there’s still a chance. Call me on Long Island. Love Rae. (remember me?)”
He had closed up the trailer in two days.
Inside the bungalow the Italian girl was having a bad time. The mescal willies. She turned and threw her arms up in a mescal dream. It made you feel like you were falling through water where there wasn’t any bottom to reach. She called out, “Please don’t get in bed with me, will you please not, please.” He wondered if she was dreaming about him or about the boy with his eye thumbed out or about somebody even worse.
He watched another truck wind down the American Highway, let his eyes widen in the darkness. He’d be happy once Rae came back and they could get out. That was all he cared about now. The fights hadn’t made him feel lucky, but they hadn’t bummed anything either, and that was acceptable. It could be worse. He heard dogs barking down in the Reforma. A bitch was in heat, and all the other dogs were enjoying it.
He walked back inside. The Italian girl was sitting in bed in the dark, smoking a cigarette.
“I don’t know why I came up here with you,” she said. She was angry, and she was getting ready to split. He sat on the wooden chair and wondered how she’d get back down the hill to town. “You meet a lot of people traveling,” she said coldly. “People you wouldn’t think of passing time with somewhere else.” She blew more smoke into the air and watched him in the dark. She seemed sorry about a lot of things all at once. “I sucked you off, right?” she said. “And I don’t even know your name.”
“Harry Quinn,” he said. He tried to think of a funny name, but couldn’t come up with one funny enough. It didn’t make any difference. She was just a bimbo, and she knew it, and she was pissed about it. He couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t had first-rate treatment.
“You could be a policeman, you know,” she said. “I’m smuggling fucking ludes and crossroads and you could bust me, and where would I be?”
“Looking at you, you’d probably still be right here,” Quinn said. He wanted to give her her due, but he didn’t want to be up all night sympathizing. He knew he should’ve gotten her out before she went to sleep.
“That’s the problem for foreigners in a strange country,” she said.
“What’s that?” he said.
“A frame of reference,” she said. “You lack a frame of reference that allows you to take the right mental picture. I’d never know if you were a fucking federate until it was too late. You could be a federate for all I know, and I’d be in the prisión with all the other assholes.” She mashed the cigarette out on the wall behind her. He thought he could end it better than this. He wanted to go back to sleep, but thought he might’ve waited too long. “I trusted you,” she said, and cleared her throat of smoke. “You know trust is at the heart of love and art and all kinds of shit. And you could have just had me off. What does that shitty tattoo say on your arm?”
“Good conduct,” Quinn said. “It’s supposed to keep me out of trouble. But it doesn’t work.”
“Well I think you’re an asshole,” she said. “Only asshole trash have tattoos. You and your fucking muscles.”
“Why don’t you go back down the hill?” he said. “I’ll get up and drive you.” He thought he could win back an hour or two if she was gone.
“Just forget it,” she said, and slid back down under the covers.
He didn’t understand why the girl said she was Italian. Maybe it just made her happy. Maybe she thought she had missed something somewhere. She was just a bad idea, that’s all. But she’d be gone and she was just paying him back for the fights and for being on the skids in a town where she didn’t know anybody. Somebody had to pay for that offense. And he didn’t mind, if it gave her a lift. It could be a gift he gave her.
2
THERE WERE PLENTY of edifying stories about the Oaxaca prisión. As many as there were parts of the body to get interested in. They began, once you told them, to have the appeal of dirty limericks. Each one was worse than the one before, but you kept listening indefinitely because of the pacing. There was the one about the American jockey with the big crank who fucked every whore that stumbled up the road from Animas Trujano, and came down eventually with a burning that made his testicles swell up and burst before a doctor could get inside. There was the one Sonny told him on his first visitor’s day about the kid from Beloit with an earache who died in two hours when whatever it was in his ear made connection with his brain. People committed suicide with crochet needles. The mayores in the “F” barracks beheaded their boyfriends and left them in their beds for days. But the story that interested Quinn was the Austrian woman whose husband was doing years for holding ten Bolivian aspirins on a DC-3 bound for Cancun. The man was an appliance-store owner and wasn’t healthy, and his wife flew from Vienna and visited him every day. And every day the matrons in the women’s precinct submitted her to the most intimate personal searches. And after a while, Sonny said, the woman began to come twice a day, in the morning and during siesta, when the matrons had more time, and then more often, until eventually the matrons got bored and wouldn’t search her unless she paid them. Otherwise they would pass her through to her husband. And the woman had long ago stopped being interested in him. It demonstrated, he thought, the way people adapted to circumstances when the circumstances went out of control. And it was in the spirit of things in Mexico. Mexico was like Vietnam or L.A., only more disappointing—a great trivial abundance of crap the chief effect of which wasn’t variety but sameness. And since you couldn’t remember the particulars from one day to the next, you couldn’t remember what to avoid and control. And the only consolation finally was that you didn’t have any stake in it, and Quinn didn’t figure to be around long enough to earn one.
Bernhardt drove the car intently, as though something was troubling him. They were out near the prisión on the American Highway driving too fast in Bernhardt’s Mercedes. The morning had developed a painful opaline glare, and out behind, Oaxaca had scaled back flat in the distance, a matte plate of jacarandas and palmeras and square-roofed casitas and the pale double corona of the Santo Domingo Cathedral, the clear dreamy Mexican air diminishing everything. Mexican cities at a distance, Quinn believed, gave you a different illusion from American cities. They looked like dream oases, whereas American cities looked like disassembled nightmares, but the facts were reversed and American cities were better places when you got there.
“Last night we have a large cocaine interception at the airport,” Bernhardt said. He looked concerned, as though the news disappointed him. “A shooting. One man, an American serviceman, is shot thirty times. The police even shoot each other in the excitement.” Bernhardt stared straight ahead, his hands firmly on top of the steering wheel.
They were well out of the city now on the broad reach of flat highway. It was precisely what he wanted to stay clear of, the periphery of things out of control. That was trouble. You had to stay center-on. There were a lot of second-class buses wallowing in the other way, old Flxibles with school coaches slop-painted red and white, jostling to pieces. And there were Indians lining the dusty roadside toward town. The Indians all walked with the same jaunty gait that made them look ambitious. “In Mexico,” Bernhardt continued, “to obey the law is always to avoid it. If police are shot, then guerrillas are accused. Then the law comes to every place. And if guerrillas are accused, then there are more guerrillas to locate.” He glanced at the Indians the car was passing. “Many people don’t know they’re guerrillas before the police say so. But they begin to act that way as soon as they find out.” Bernhardt shrugged.
“That’s real tough,” Quinn said.
“Perhaps it won’t matter to you now,” Bernhardt said confidently. “Your wife arrives this afternoon?”
“That’s the plan,” Quinn said.
“And she will have everything?”
Bernhardt meant the money. “She’ll have it.”
“Then it will be smooth,” Bernhardt said.
“That’s what I want,” Quinn said. “No spectacles.”
When Rae had split he had started doing what they used to call winter camping. Finnish lunacy. He had driven in the Scout north of Antrim on the fifteenth of January, built a basswood platform for his tent, and begun to concentrate attention on the Ojibwas. He drove the corduroy roads and the pine slashes with his .336 across his lap and a chambered round, until he saw their cars, bricked down in the trunk, snugged in with dead falls across the hoods, old rusted Nashes and Studebaker trucks with the headlights blacked. He’d drive out at midnight with his lights off, secure the road with the Scout, and snowshoe up, following their narrow trail until he could hear voices. Then he’d circle out so that he came down on them from deeper in the woods where they weren’t expecting anything. He had perfected the ability to travel silently, and so he would catch them stark in his seal beam over a doe, smoking dope and stashing the sawed parts in black garbage bags to sled back to the cars. The Ojibwas called it high-speed beef, and it was a trick to plank a salt lick in a forked tree and let the deer work it through until they were leaning in to get at the last wafer crust when the larch stakes that formed a funnel to the salt caught them behind the neck and held them until the Ojibwas arrived in the trucks at night with their chain saws and cruiser axes. Sometimes the deer would freeze to death, and sometimes they’d rupture the big artery in their necks from bucking. But mostly they’d stand still and breathe until the men came softly up with their flashlights, saws, and garbage bags and cut their throats and bled them while the men sat and rolled a joint and waited for the carcasses to drain out. He caught twenty Indians the first month and the word began to spread around. He’d put the cuffs on them and walk them out to the road, set them in the back of the Scout, then drive the deer to the county locker and the Ojibwas to the Federal Marshall in Traverse City who fined them a hundred and turned them loose. He caught the same men again and again, and it got to be a joke. But he had the time, and he couldn’t sleep two straight hours in the tent, and the Ojibwas never hassled, and there wasn’t anything else to do until spring.
The terrain now was high-mountain cordillera, pleated and folded into a long blind valley of brown unclassified earth turning chalk green
downrange and curling toward the higher peaks like sandpaper. Once in a while, you could make out a red tower pricked above the palm plats in the tiny distant pueblos, but the land itself was degraded and upended. It was not the kind of landscape he liked. Not a complex landscape. The light was too clear and unvarying. In the States these mountains would have names, but here the sense of permanence was expressed differently, by an anonymity that made you aware of seeing only half a mountain, as if the other side could all be painted orange.
The people on the road were all Zapotecs carrying bound woolens and water tins into the mercado. Now and then a group of children danced at the edge of the road dangling iguanas on strings. The iguanas stroked slowly in the air while the children flailed them at the cars, but all Quinn could hear, fading, were cries that sounded like “good-bye, good-bye.”
“If he had not signed a confession,” Bernhardt said, “it would be easier now.” He cleared his throat. “If he was braver.”
“He wouldn’t be our boy then,” Quinn said. Something about Sonny’s name made Bernhardt uncomfortable. He never spoke it. “So what do you do with a fucking iguana?” He looked back at the children traipsing away from the road toward a bombed-out adobe with no roof. It was never verifiable if most Mexican houses were half finished or half torn down.
“Set them loose,” Bernhardt said authoritatively. He paused a moment. “Sometimes I buy one.” He smiled in a comradely way. “And then I set it loose down the carretera. What could I do with it?”
Quinn faced the road again. “Let ’em keep it,” he said. “Just pay off.”
“They don’t want iguanas.” Bernhardt shook his head. “They are a nuisance. Why would they want them more than you do?”
Bernhardt was the Mexican lawyer he had paid to get Rae’s brother out of the prisión. He had gotten on to Bernhardt through the consulate, who said Bernhardt had had success with American druggies, had reliable principles, and wasn’t cheap. Bernhardt liked Americans and smiled a lot and seemed to have good connections with the administración de justicia. He was the best you could do. He reminded Quinn of the U.S.I.A. officers he had seen in the war, expensive suits, slightly balding, and a positive temperance that made you want to trust him. At best he figured Bernhardt wasn’t bored enough to get involved if there wasn’t a chance to buy Sonny out.