by Richard Ford
“Who killed the boy?” he said.
“Who knows?” Bernhardt said placidly and shook his head.
“You work for them too?”
“I must know people who are not my clients.” Bernhardt let the blade dance between his fingers while he thought a moment. His eyes half closed. “I am your lawyer. It is unreasonable to represent two sides.”
Quinn stared at the silver Llama. It seemed sensible. He felt like he was being let inside something new that would be profoundly ordinary and profoundly predictable in every nuance, and that whatever was lethal in it would appear not to be, and vice versa, and for that reason was all the more lethal.
“What do I have to do?” he said.
Bernhardt leaned forward in his chair. Far out in the Colonia La Paz there was the chatter of small-arms fire and the wetted thop-thopping of a helicopter. It had become too far away to matter. “Tonight I will drive and get you. Your wife may come with us, it will not be unpleasant.” Bernhardt had become businesslike now, as though he was satisfied by events. “Afterward. You will leave your house, I will have a hotel for you. When he is released, your brother-in-law will need to leave quickly. I have a turista card and a ticket. It will be smooth, but it is best to avoid the law still.”
“What’s wrong with the bungalow?” He was thinking about the money and about Rae alone there. It made his stomach tighten.
Bernhardt’s features gathered gradually around his large mouth, which had become pinched in thought. “Nothing,” he said. He looked innocently across the desk. “It is more efficient. You are leaving. It will be easier.”
“Where’s the room?”
“In the Centro,” Bernhardt said. “The Monte Albán.” His eyes shone.
“How safe is it?”
“Very safe,” Bernhardt said confidently. He opened his desk drawer, took out a small photograph, and pushed it across the desk. A blond woman stood in what looked like a motel swimming pool, naked from the waist up. Her small breasts were nearly invisible in the baked colors and she was smiling hopefully, as if what was happening to her was not what she had expected but was something she was trying to get through.
“This is a woman I knew once in Texas,” Bernhardt said confidentially. “She is not bad looking? Do you think?”
“No.” Quinn put the picture back on the desk top. There was writing on the back side. The woman, he guessed, was trapped.
Bernhardt seemed pleased and took the picture back. “You should trust me now,” he said, and smiled and put the picture in the drawer. “Maybe you don’t trust me before.”
“I trust you,” Quinn said. “What’s my choice?”
“But you should trust me as if you had a choice,” Bernhardt said. “You have this against me now.”
“I don’t need anything against you.” Quinn stood forward into the dim light. “That doesn’t mean shit to me.”
“It is an intimacy,” Bernhardt said proudly. “As if we were friends.”
“Any way you want it,” Quinn said, and turned to leave.
Bernhardt smiled at him. “I invite you not to worry now,” he said.
“That’d be nice,” Quinn said. “But I don’t think it’s going to work out like that.”
18
HE CAUGHT THE REFORMA BUS back up the hill. The bus should have been empty in midafternoon, but it was crowded with poor women and private-school girls in blue kilts riding home to the wealthy neighborhoods, and beyond into the slum barrios above San Andrés Huayapán. A soldier rode in the front step well, but when the bus departed the Centro, he fell asleep against his rifle and everyone became quiet. The schoolgirls sat stiffly facing forward with their books on their bare knees, not looking out.
The shooting in Colonia La Paz had stopped, and the streets felt sealed off. The tortilleriás, the little cubed single-door buildings with names like Mimi and Fifi, were all closed and the wooden doors bolted. A mist had burned off the hills and been borne up, leaving the south end of the valley in a Levantine light that turned the mountains gaudy, green and yellow and black as far as you could see downrange. It was like a National Geopraphic, a stricken landscape that appealed to you the moment you realized you’d never be there. Only, he thought, he was there now, and it made him feel on the edge of something dangerous, as though a sense of lucklessness swam in the air around him.
His mother had told him once after his father had died that the worst of the thirties in Michigan had been to see time making people luckless, people who had never thought of themselves that way, but who had had to begin thinking it because of money, becoming, as she said, a class apart and unreachable. When they had moved off the farm to Traverse City, across from them had been a big yellow house owned by some Jews from Grand Rapids, but in the late forties when his father was working for Deere, it had turned over and become a rooming house with a sign in front that said, simply, DIEL 33377. He couldn’t forget the number now or the way someone had spelled dial wrong. After a while, the people in the neighborhood began to refer to it only as the Dial House and believed, with his mother, that the people who lived there were luckless, as though it was still the thirties and the people were pariahs. Cabs parked there long hours and sometimes overnight while their drivers were inside. Transients moved in and out of the upstairs in cherry time. New children turned up playing in the curb gutters summers, looking as if they had lived there all their lives. And his mother, with the other people in the neighborhood, disliked them, the tall knobby-faced men with long slick hair, and the children, dark and barefooted, and the tiny, silent Mexican-looking women you only saw in doorways. His mother pulled him inside when she thought he played with them or showed a tolerance for them, which he did. Some of them, he thought, were musicians, Southerners or men from Indiana, who played the local radio shows, and the women and children were their families. Though now, staring at the empty streets as the bus heaved across the American Highway and up into the better, upper-class neighborhoods below the bungalow, to wherever the rich schoolgirls lived behind walls, a long way from Traverse City, he believed they were just country people with nothing to live on, gone from wherever they had lived, ready to go anyplace to improve their luck. Maybe they would’ve done something illegal or violent, which is what his mother had thought and warned, but he doubted if there was ever any chance. His mother called them “common,” which was a serious epithet in Michigan, a notch above trash. And she said the word as if it had a bad smell on it, and didn’t like saying it as much as she didn’t like the people she meant it to describe. She thought, he knew, that his father’s family, who were from Niles, had an impulse that carried them (and him too) toward the common, and that their tolerance for it was a weak board in the family character, weak and corruptible. And it terrified her the way moving off the farm had terrified her, the way the long grey expanse of the lake terrified her, the way the hand terrified her for what it meant. She saw it in his father and in him, and thought that she herself was totally incorruptible, and that she should encourage at least obstinancy in them both, which would do the work character and incorruptibility would’ve done if they had existed in them. It was why, Quinn thought, his father had been glad to lose his hand and quit farming and wanting to farm, and why his mother had waked up screaming. She didn’t know when you’d gone too far with something and when obstinance and self-denying became a bigger threat than whatever loss it kept away in the first place. And his father, finally, had had to learn that in a hard way.
The point was, he knew now, after all those months alone in the trailer and in the Scout and out in the woods in the tent, that everybody lives in some relation to the luckless, whether they call it that or call it something else, or whether they manage to live near it or far away. And what mattered most was that you knew the relation moment to moment, like the one he felt now, the particular danger, so that your life turned out to be a matter of what you did to make that bearable, since you couldn’t get so far away from it as to make it not exist. Thoug
h when you tried to protect yourself completely and never suffer a loss or a threat, you ended up with nothing. Or worse, you ended up being absorbed right into nothing, into the very luckless thing you were most afraid of.
He walked the last shaded blocks to the bungalow. Things were quiet and protected in the colonia, a universe apart from down the hill. Two of the schoolgirls got off and walked hurriedly the other way, talking in hushed voices. The Dodge was parked below the gate where he’d left it. He remembered the lavaliere under the seat, and decided it would go better when they were gone tomorrow. He wondered exactly how long it took news to get as far away as Minnesota. He thought it couldn’t take long.
Rae was sitting in the living room beside the blank television. The light in the room was liquid and green. The floor had been scrubbed and a white film left on. He was thinking about the money. “Did the moza come?” he said, and walked to the bathroom. Grey water stood in a puddle at the base of the shower. He got on his knees and ran his finger along the groove. Water didn’t matter, but the tiles could get stepped on.
Rae stood barefooted at the door watching him. She had on his plaid bathrobe. She looked woozy. “Do you think she’d steal it?” Rae said.
“Only if she found it,” he said. He moved to the tiles behind the toilet.
“Do you fuck her too?” Rae said. “She’s pretty. We exchanged nasties while she cleaned. She said you were very amable and very generoso with her.”
“That’s right.” His knees were wet and the floor smelled piny where the girl had scrubbed with solvent and sprayed with O.K.O. She was a Mixtec girl with ulcers who was learning to read in the technological college. She had asked help with her letters, and he had demonstrated an upper-case Q.
He dug the paste with his fingers and lifted the tiles off the pistol. Water had seeped and beaded on the bluing. Grouting was already crumbled into the cylinder.
“Do you need that?” she said earnestly. She was holding onto the doorjamb, staring at the gun as if it were an odd color. She had taken something. But there was no use hassling it.
“You never can tell.” He sat back on his knees and dropped the cylinder.
“Are you going to kill somebody?” she said.
He looked at her. He had just an afterimage of Deats’ $200 alligator shoes standing in the filthy water. He was ready to shoot Deats now. There wasn’t any more doubt. “Did anybody come?” he said.
“No,” Rae said. She shook her head. Her face was pale in the aqueous light. He got off his knees and brought the gun to the living room where the light was truer.
“Did you like the tour?” he said. He sat on the davenport, tore a strip off his handkerchief, and emptied the rounds into the rest of it.
Rae sat facing him, her bare knees under the hem of the bathrobe like the Catholic girls on the bus. She kept watching him, holding herself together. “They have men up there who slip through the bushes behind the ruins to sell you jade. They whisper at you,” she said. “I left when I saw that. It’s all fake. They have them in Santa Fe at the pueblos. Some farmer always finds something. Antigüedad. It’s just bullshit.”
“The ruins are real, though, right?” he said.
“Do you want to know where I went when I left in the night last year? Or even why?”
He used the tine of his belt buckle to force the handkerchief down the barrel of the Smith & Wesson, then squeezed the nub end back through the breech. “I don’t much care,” he said. She seemed argumentative, and he understood it. He just didn’t want to be that way now. The gun gave him a sense of relief.
She ran her hand through her hair and sat back in the chair. “I thought I’d try to find a place I liked, since I never had before. But I couldn’t. Isn’t that sad? It all seemed so bad. So I went to the dog races. I thought I might see where I went wrong. Just for luck.” He picked up each cartridge separately and wiped it with the clean part of the handkerchief. They were still oily. He took the strip and pushed through each empty chamber. It needed solvent and the right brushes. Her conversation didn’t interest him. “Then I went back to Tesuque, and then daddy got sick, and then I just sat around Bay Shore. I tend just to let things happen sometimes,” she said. “I can’t survive being alienated very long.”
“You should’ve taken up with those high rollers in the plaid suits,” he said.
“How did you feel?” she said, ignoring him.
He looked up at her. “You should’ve stayed around. You could’ve found out.” He held the trigger and let the hammer ease in and out of the pin slot, listening for grit. There wasn’t any, and he wiped the cylinder and began sliding the rounds back.
“I couldn’t ever tell what the hell your life was in behalf of,” she said.
“So do you know now?” he said.
“I forgive you, though,” she said. He looked at her. “For being a fuck and for making me have to run out of there.”
“I didn’t want to have to ask you for anything else,” he said. He put the last round in the chamber and closed the cylinder slowly with his thumb and his middle finger until the spring locked conclusively and the cylinder wound up to train on the pin. “I didn’t want to get lost. Do you know what I mean?”
She shook her head. “That’s not being in love.”
“It’s close though,” he said. He took the gun and put it between the cushions of the davenport, not too deep to get at easily. He pulled it out and pushed it in. Deats would be in the bungalow again, and he wanted it set up right. The Italian girl’s face rotated up in his mind, the thing about not having a clear frame of reference. He wanted a clear frame of reference with Rae, but it kept expanding all the time.
“Why does it just have to be close, goddamn it.” She was crying, but she was Darvoned out, and she couldn’t cry very hard. “I don’t like that,” she said. “Close isn’t good enough. There’s nothing nice in that.”
He felt all right about the gun. He walked to the window and gazed over the terraced bungalows and TV antennas toward Monte Albán, south of which the sun was an orange helix subsiding into the mountains. “No, there’s not,” he said.
“It’s just all a loss to you, isn’t it?” she said. “And you have to prevent that at all costs. You have to keep yourself protected all the time.”
“I think that’s wrong,” he said. He liked the dun texture of the mountains once the sun was gone, and the light was all residue.
“And that’s why you came down here, isn’t it? Because it’s as mean as you are, and you can test yourself.” She wiped at her eyes with her hand and glared at him. It was just leftover anger.
“I came because you asked me to,” he said. “I thought there might not be another chance.” He walked across the room.
“There wouldn’t be,” she said.
“Then I guess I was right,” he said as he opened the door and walked toward the car to get the lavaliere. It was as good a time as there would ever be.
After dark he lay on the bedspread, dressed, waiting for Bernhardt’s car, waiting for the headlights to crawl the windows. He could hear insects in the wall behind his head. His stomach was quiet and emptied, and he felt articulated in the dark. He thought about a girl he’d fucked when Rae had left, a nursing-college girl from Ann Arbor, slumming in the ski bars at Shanty Creek and Mount Mancelona, east of Charlevoix. She was nineteen and had braided hair and long white arms, and seemed at ease being alone. When she had her clothes off, on the bed inside the trailer, looking cheerful as if everything was familiar, she said suddenly, “My father died last month, see, and I felt like no one had ever made an effort to know him, not even my mom.” She smiled as if this was what she wanted to talk about more than anything. “And I was really tired, see, of hearing about movie stars and football players, all kinds of other people who had died.” She stopped a moment and thought while she unpinned her hair. “A lot of great human beings die and never get any attention, and it makes me angry. Do you know what I mean? They just disappear.” She let
her hair fall down and shook it and put the pins one at a time on the nightstand.
“I guess so,” Quinn said, staring at his boots on the cold floor. Her life was complicated with events that obligated her, that were limitlessly signifying and engrossing, but that didn’t make any difference to him. He tried to think of his old man and couldn’t, tried to think if anybody had paid attention to his old man and couldn’t remember. And it suddenly made him feel trapped, as if empty space was closing down around him, and made him sick with longing, a way he thought he wouldn’t feel once Rae was out of it, but that he couldn’t keep back now, a feeling of detachment and impairment, something he didn’t want ever to happen and thought he had figured how to prevent, but had failed.
“I bet you were in Nam,” the girl said and smiled at him happily and took his hand and held it to her cheek.
“What makes you think so?” he said.
“You got that tattoo,” she said. “You don’t look like a biker.” She leaned to turn off the light. “But that’s cool. You don’t care about my father. We couldn’t be here if you did, right? You’d have too much sympathy for me.”
Rae sat at the foot of the bed. He could smell her perfume in the dark air, could feel her nervousness. “I can’t be ironic with you, Harry,” she said quietly. “I sat out there and wanted to be but I couldn’t. I don’t protect myself well enough, do I? I just get mad.”
“Do you still want me to protect you?” he said. He thought he might be able to, the first time ever.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t like the way you think about things. You look at everything like it disappears down a hole that nothing ever comes out of. And that scares me.” He listened for Bernhardt’s car in the street. “Doesn’t that make you lonely?”
“That’s not the right question,” Quinn said.