The Ultimate Good Luck

by Richard Ford

  “I got a card from Kirsten today,” Sonny said and looked up respectfully. “She said if you were down here, Harry, she wasn’t going to worry about me. She thinks you’re smart because you were in Nam. You know?”

  “Great,” Quinn said. Kirsten had split when Sonny started muling. She had driven his Cadillac to the L.A. airport and flown to Uppsala and didn’t tell Sonny where his car was for a month, and Sonny couldn’t call the police because the trunk was full of lorazepam. She wasn’t stupid, and Sonny knew it. And he knew he was. And that was why he was staying so mad about it.

  “She’s a cunt, you know?” Sonny said. He still seemed glad.

  “You need anything else?” Quinn said. Enough time was by now for dress-up. He wanted outside. Sonny made him weak-stomached.

  “How’re the Tigers?” Sonny looked at both of them as if he wasn’t sure which one would answer. He seemed suddenly nervous, and squeezed his hands together harder. His breath smelled impure.

  “Read it.” Quinn shoved back the bag with the Houston Chronicle in it. Sonny’s breath was making his saliva ropy.

  Sonny began glancing at Bernhardt off and on. “I like the Tigers,” he said. Bernhardt was still interested in the whore and not paying strict attention. He was just along for the ride this time, a public appearance. “Look,” Sonny said indecisively. He stared back at Quinn. Sonny’s face was pathetic, and he suddenly exhaled a lot of bad air all at once. “There was a guy here today.” He kept staring at Quinn as if the words meant less if you didn’t acknowledge them.

  Bernhardt’s attention settled back onto Sonny’s face and he looked at Sonny oddly. Sonny opened his fingers deliberately on the tabletop and breathed in deeply.

  “What’s that mean?” Quinn said.

  “An L.A. guy,” Sonny said softly. He looked down. “It’s fucked up.”

  “What kind of fucked up?” Quinn said. It surprised him, but there was a sense he wasn’t hearing it right. He didn’t want to raise his voice, that wouldn’t be the way, except he wanted to hear it right. He felt muscles in his arm crawl.

  “What are you talking about?” Bernhardt said patiently.

  Sonny looked at Bernhardt, then back at his hands as if Bernhardt were talking about his hands. “They think I skimmed the stuff,” he said meekly.

  Quinn sat back on his stool and looked at the whore behind Sonny. He could see the backs of her calves where she had the stool straddled like a seesaw. Her toes were holding the concrete to keep the kid in the T-shirt from prying her off onto the floor. The kid’s eyes were darting and his mouth had a frozen look of purpose. He was trying to reach something inside her that no one had ever reached before.

  “They think what?” Quinn said.

  “They think he makes the deal and lets himself be arrested,” Bernhardt said calmly. He was staring at Sonny bemused. He ran his thumb down his jawline, then leaned on it.

  “That’s crazy, isn’t it? Isn’t that fucking crazy?” Quinn looked at Sonny hopefully. “You didn’t to that, did you?”

  Sonny tried to look insulted. “No way,” he said. “I’m mules. That’s it.” He started to raise his hands off the tabletop, then set them down again.

  “That’s crazy,” Quinn said to Bernhardt.

  “It is not impossible,” Bernhardt said calmy and adjusted his glasses. Something in Sonny’s face seemed to interest him, as though all his features had become more complicated. “It’s happened before,” he said. “Though not to my client.”

  “In here?” Quinn said. “To want to get in here?”

  “One can arrange to get out,” Bernhardt said. He raised his eyebrows. The muscles of his jaw rose beneath his cheeks.

  Sonny looked at Bernhardt and Quinn quickly as if things were going wacko now. He made his ponytail swing. “No way,” he said. “I don’t own insides.”

  Quinn didn’t like the edge in Sonny’s voice. He couldn’t figure out what was causing it and he didn’t like that. “Are you fucking on me, Sonny?” he said.

  Sonny’s face got pale. “Look man,” Sonny said, “don’t bullshit me now.”

  He was pissed all at once, but under wraps. He didn’t want to go in next. “I’m not shitting you. Why should I shit you? I’m down here to get you fucking out of this shit hole, you douche bag, and all of a sudden you don’t sound right. You understand what I mean? You don’t sound right to me. And I don’t have a plan for that.” He wanted to hear something to make sense or he was going to pack everything in the minute Rae got off the plane.

  “Who is the man?” Bernhardt said intently, leaning forward.

  Sonny breathed deeply and closed his hands around the paper sack as if it contained all his hopes and he was having to give it up. “A spade,” he said and breathed again very deeply. “Deats. A guy named Deats.”

  “Who does he work for?” Bernhardt said.

  “L.A. people. I don’t know them. I’ve seen him before at the Lakers’ games, you know. He’s a big player.”

  “So is he a pal of yours?” Quinn said.

  “I don’t know him.” Sonny shook his head in a bewildered way. “He’s inside. I’m not inside.”

  “What did he say to you?” Bernhardt asked. He was being methodical now.

  Sonny gripped the neck of the sack and licked his lips. “That he wanted the stuff.”

  “Why does he think you took it?” Quinn said.

  “He said the police only took two pounds off me, and he paid for four.” Sonny looked across at Bernhardt.

  “What did you pick up?” Bernhardt said deliberately. “How many kilograms?”

  Sonny shook his head. “I just pick up packages. I don’t weigh it. Weighing’s their business. I left the money in my hotel room, took a walk on the zócalo, and when I came back there were two packages on the bed. That’s what the federates got.”

  Quinn looked at Bernhardt. “They must’ve copped it on him, right? Say that’s right.”

  Bernhardt pushed out his lower lip and studied Sonny. “If it goes, it goes high up,” he said. “For the police there is more money in doing things correctly.” He smacked his lips and looked at Sonny matter-of-factly. “Do you have it?” he said.

  Whatever Sonny had popped on had burned off in sixty seconds. His face was gaunt and his eyes looked ruined. He looked to Quinn like somebody who’d run a long way without stopping, for the first time in his life. “No,” he said almost silently and shook his head.

  “And you don’t know who anybody is?” Quinn said.

  “L.A. people,” Sonny said softly. “I know a guy in L.A. He pays me. It comes through Mexico because it’s safer than straight up. But I don’t meet anybody down here. I just mule.” He looked up pitiably. “I’m not smart enough. You understand?”

  “How much time did he give you?” Bernhardt said, interrupted by some low moaning coming from the whore on the stool. Bernhardt turned to look at her.

  “He didn’t say.” Sonny stared at Bernhardt expressionless, waiting for his attention to come back. He was wanting a miracle. Quinn knew the look, though he didn’t care about it on Sonny. His face just wasn’t useful to what he felt.

  “You fucking putz,” he said and sighed. He wanted to let Sonny take it all down. But there wasn’t even any way for that now. He was in too far.

  Sonny looked like he might cry. “It’s a setup,” he said. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Who’s supposed to be set up?” Quinn said. “You? Are you worth setting up, asshole?”

  “I don’t know,” Sonny said and shook his head pathetically.

  Bernhardt stood up. The whore had finished making noise and was sitting straight on her stool, fanning her cheeks with her hand. The boy looked radiant. The room was quiet except for the fan at the end, and the sound of the guards’ feet scuffing. “Try to stay tranquilo,” Bernhardt said courteously.

  Sonny opened his mouth to speak, but Bernhardt wasn’t listening. He had started toward the exit.

  “What’s happening?�
� Sonny said. He seemed amazed.

  “You fucked this up,” Quinn said. “This was slick, and now it’s fucked up.”

  “What’re you going to do?” Sonny said.

  “Guess,” Quinn said.

  Sonny looked pathetic again. “When’s Rae coming?” he said.

  Bernhardt was already out the door. “Don’t think about her,” Quinn said. “Just pretend she doesn’t exist.”

  “This is dumb,” Sonny said. “Jesus this is so goddamned dumb.”

  “Is that right?” Quinn said. “You’re a fucking genius, man. I don’t know how you ever got in here.” He walked down between the rows of tables toward the blank wall where the exit was.

  4

  THE HIGH MOUNTAIN on the west valleyside had lost the sun and blackened down to the color of green without light. In the winter, chaparral fires blossomed in the steep inclines and defiles, hanging a mask of haze to the terminus of the valley. The fire burned for weeks, and people stopped noticing it, and after a while the smoke just became part of the landscape. It was, Quinn thought, the way you got yourself used to everything. It was like imagination, and then it was the way things were. And then you couldn’t tell the difference.

  “So how do we find this guy?” he said. Rae would be here too soon and things weren’t falling out just right.

  “It won’t be difficult.” Bernhardt adjusted his glasses with his thumb and fingers, then squinted over the steering wheel toward Monte Albán, clear in the open distance west, where there were still morning light windows on the precipices. Bernhardt was driving fast, “What would your wife’s brother do for money?” he said calmly.

  “Nothing that big,” Quinn said. “He couldn’t lay off that much.”

  “He could mail it to an apartado in the States, a dummy.” Bernhardt seemed to enjoy the speculation.

  “He’s too little.”

  “A great deal of trouble can be caused by little liars. You understand?” Bernhardt looked at him appraisingly.

  “No way,” he said. “He doesn’t have a big imagination.”

  Bernhardt fastened his eyes back on the highway. “Then we will have to impress the other man,” he said. “Mr. Deats. I will have to find a way to do that.”

  “What happens meantime?” His mind was on Rae. It was too late to call her in Texas. She’d be out of the motel already.

  “We will purchase the document of release,” Bernhardt said evenly. “I will go on with the arrangements to the judge. You will meet your wife. Things will go as we planned them. We can’t worry about Mr. Deats. It is a delicate situation.”

  They were approaching the army spec station from the opposite direction. More buses sat queued on the dusty shoulder wheezing smoke. Soldiers were busy on top of the lead coach throwing boxes and bundles on the ground while the Indians stood passively with their arms over their heads. The red travel van that had been in the queue before was parked beside the station hut with all its windows broken and its seats pulled out. None of the girls was around anymore. They were Americans, but there was nothing he could do for them, and it gave him a cold bone feeling to wonder where they were and what they were getting to look at next.

  Bernhardt pulled out around the buses to center highway, idled to the barricade, showed his license, and was passed.

  “In twenty years,” he said when he had gained speed, “Mexico will be governed by defectives, the children of these people.” He motioned backward toward the campesinos standing in the dirt for search. There was a profound sympathy that rivaled distaste in his voice. But it was tone and no substance. “They are fed on garbage. And one day nothing will please them anymore.” He reached under the dash, removed the pistol, and put it back under his coat. “And then you and I will have a big problem.”

  “It doesn’t worry me much.” Quinn said. He thought about his own pistol in the bungalow, and Bernhardt’s advice to carry it. It wasn’t smart.

  “Why?” Bernhardt said and smiled, as though all the alternatives were amusing.

  “Because if that time comes and I’m alive, I won’t be right here.”

  “Where will you be?” Bernhardt said.

  “Far away from here.”

  “One never knows,” Bernhardt said, letting himself be distracted again by the mountains, visible only as a black mass in the west.

  “Oh yeah,” Quinn said. “One knows that. One knows that for sure.”

  He wondered precisely where, down the line, Bernhardt would bolt. He knew he would somewhere, and he wanted to anticipate it, so that when Bernhardt hit out, there’d be one more option left for himself and Rae. One was enough. He watched a white helicopter skimming the blue air to the east, out of hearing, its tail strung up as if a fine, invisible filament was hauling it on. It was nuts, he thought, to be tied to somebody, two counting Bernhardt, you had no feeling about, but who somehow made all the difference. That was the essence of the modern predicament. The guy who had it in for you was the guy you’d never seen. The one you loved was the one you couldn’t be understood by. The one you paid to trust was the one you were sure would cut and run. The best you could think was maybe you’d get lucky, and come out with some skin left on.

  5

  HE HAD MET RAE at the dogs. He had been back from Vietnam eight months and through Pendleton, thinking all the time that the one lesson the war had taught was that everybody back in the world was lucky, and the best thing you could do the moment they turned you loose was push your luck on out and find some way to take a chance and some place to take it.

  He had bought a Firebird off a sailor in Oceanside and drove it to Arizona, then down to Corpus Christi and across to Morgan City, Louisiana. In Morgan, the car dropped reverse and while he was waiting for parts he started taking seven-on, seven-offs for a pipe contractor supplying the hammer companies out on the Atchafalaya and Pigeon Bay as far out as Point au Fer. He had had a sense when he joined the marines that the country he was skying out of was a known locale, with a character that was exact and coordinate and that maintained a certain patterned feel. A thing you could get back with if you had a reason. But that patterned feel had gotten disrupted somehow, as though everything whole had separated a little inch, and he had dropped back in between things, to being on the periphery without a peripheral perspective. They weren’t any war dreams of men you’d killed screaming underwater without sound. (He couldn’t commit specific fears to memory.) But he felt alone without quite feeling bad, like being in the afterimage of a catastrophe, though he thought he’d gotten used to catastrophes all right without falling apart.

  In Morgan he traded the Firebird and four thousand dollars for a Porsche, decided to hang in for the money, and moved out to company bunks in an Alamo Plaza painted company blue out Route 90. On his seven-off he liked driving up to Kenner to the dog track and playing cards in the bars in Evangeline Parish and working the women. He didn’t have any plans. All the colleges he’d ever been in didn’t teach him what he’d learned in two years out of the world, that once strangers you couldn’t see started shooting guns at you and trying to set you on fire way up in the sky, plans didn’t take you too far. And the only thing smart you could do was try to stay efficient and keep your private shit together. He’d picked up the tattoo in Hawaii. Good conduct was what kept you in the picture, kept ground underneath you instead of on top, and that was the only basic concept you could count on.

  When he saw Rae she was standing in the bettors’ pavilion under the grandstand, watching the TV monitor that had a dog race in progress. She was tall and elegant with long red hair, wore tight black jeans that cost some money, and a green halter that showed her breasts. She was holding a copy of Fourier’s New Industrial World under her elbow and a wad of yellow win tickets in her hand, and she looked wrongly placed, which he guessed was the point.

  He checked the old men in plaid suits and white socks who were watching the monitor, and the women wheelchair bettors cruising down the concourse in motorized chairs. He wanted to
guess which one was paying her bills. His second dog hit, but when he came back holding his $4.80, Rae was still watching the monitor showing the pale pink racetrack with his winning number flashing at the bottom. The guys in plaid suits had all scattered toward the payoffs and the wheelchair women had gone to the refreshments. But she hadn’t moved. And he suddenly liked the air. It had the stacked, cooled feeling of below zero ground, the nonplace where anything thinkable was possible if you didn’t expect a long engagement. It was what the world left available.

  He took one more look around. “You waiting for Johnny Carson?” he said.

  Rae looked at him and at the four dollars in his hand as though he wasn’t seriously there. She had on dark rouge and her eyes were flecked green. She was exotic looking, like she’d just come from someplace illegal, and she was speeding. That seemed like the right combination.

  “What d’you think they do with the ones that don’t win?” she said, and looked back at the suspended screen as though she’d asked the question to no one in particular, not even herself.

  “Shoot ’em,” he said quickly, and took another survey of the pavilion, to see if somebody was coming after her.

  “I’ve got a candidate, then,” she said flatly, “but he already left, I guess.”

  “You just read this crap between races?” he said. He didn’t know who Fourier was, but he was betting he was somebody who started a revolution in Jamaica.

  Rae smiled appealingly and snapped her head to sweep her long hair off her shoulders. “He doesn’t know enough,” she said, and sighed. “The guy who knows everything is the guy who runs the rabbit. He’s in control of fate. You don’t know him, do you?”

  He figured enough time had gone by now. “I dont want to pry, but you haven’t been to Mississippi, have you?” he said.