Well in Time

by SUZAN STILL

  All too soon, Rat tooted the horn. Calypso turned back and was relieved to see Lobo bounding toward the car from the opposite direction. In a graceful leap, he cleared the side of the car and took up his station in the center of the back seat. Calypso climbed in, Rat punched the car into a wheel-spinning start, and in an instant they were flying through the desert again.

  §

  It was just turning dusk when they spotted an obstacle in their path. It appeared that hunters in a big four-wheel drive truck were changing a flat tire, taking up the entire track. Two men in camouflage stood with shotguns broken over their forearms while a third squatted, laboring at the rear wheel. All three heads came up in alarm as the Cadillac hove into view.

  Rather than slowing, Rat sped up and with a sudden heave, wrenched the wheel to the right and charged off the road into the desert, mowing down a bush, and dodging a small outcrop of stones. Calypso gave a whoop of surprise and the tape, that had been silent between songs, suddenly yielded up “Sympathy for the Devil” at top volume, conga drums throbbing.

  “Please allow me to introduce myself/I’m a man of wealth and taste/I’ve been around for a long, long year/Stole many a man’s soul and faith…”

  “Trap,” Rat shouted.

  Calypso doubted it. She had an unobstructed view of the hunters as she and Rat crashed past them through the sagebrush. All three were open-mouthed with astonishment by this apotheosis of a powder blue Cadillac convertible, charging along as if powered by Satan himself. Clearly, this was straining their credulity as well as their masculinity.

  Their complete befuddlement struck her as so comical that she began to laugh and then to howl, until tears streamed down her cheeks. Lobo, possibly experiencing a pack moment, threw back his head and howled, too. Calypso’s final view was of the three, open-mouthed and moving zombie-like to the front of their crippled truck for a last view, as the Caddy roared back onto the road with the Stones blasting.

  “Pleased to meet you/Hope you guess my name…”

  Calypso had lost count of how many times the Stones tape had replayed. “Don’t you have any Credence Clearwater?” she shouted over the din.

  Rat’s head was pumping in time to the beat. “Who?”

  Evening fell as a flaming western sky gradually cooled to ash. One of the car’s dual headlights had been knocked askew so that its beam penetrated the roadside desert, giving evidence of approaching civilization. Beer cans, many laced with bullet holes, lay among the cactuses in increasing numbers. Enclaves of dead refrigerators, sagging couches, and spine-broken recliners sprawled amid the sagebrush.

  At last, in the distance Calypso saw a flash of light, then another and another, until the phenomenon proved to be the rhythmic pulsing of a red and yellow neon sign alternately reading, FOOD/ BEER. She realized she was famished and not just for food, but for human companionship other than that of the crazed and uncommunicative Rat.

  Still at high speed, Rat cranked the wheel and slid sideways into the dirt parking lot of the roadhouse. Slamming on the brakes just short of a line of parked cars and trucks, he brought the Cadillac to a halt with a final fishtail flourish. The persistent wind carried the dust of their arrival over them in a rain of fine particles, as the Stones finally fell silent, with a final yowl.

  “Love is just a kiss away, love is just a kiss aw…”

  “We’re here,” Rat announced with evident pride in his accomplishment.

  Calypso looked around her. Other than the tar papered bar building there was nothing else around. The shadowed desert stretched off in all directions.

  “Where?” she asked.

  Rat didn’t answer. He was already out of the car heading for the saloon doors, from which the sound of a honky-tonk piano and the smell of cooking were wafting. Calypso pushed the hair from her eyes and allowed herself to admit her hunger.

  Pushing the door open and standing to straighten the same dirt-crusted jeans and sweater she’d worn in the cave, she said, “Come on, Lobo, let’s go. This doesn’t appear to be a place where we’re expected to dress for dinner.”

  The wolf stood on the back seat, his nose to the wind. Then, apparently approving the smell of cooking meat, he leapt over the side of the car and came to stand by her knee. Calypso dropped her hand to his broad head.

  “Stick with me, kid,” she said. “I have no idea what to expect.”

  §

  As Calypso shoved open the bar door, the interior air hit her, warm and humid, bearing the unmistakable smells of beer, cooking meat, and sawdust. The room was foggy with cigarette smoke, backlit by neon beer signs, and a single mirrored ball over a tiny dance floor, where two couples shuffled in clenches that looked more like wrestling holds.

  In a back corner, she could just make out a figure bent over the keyboard of an antique upright piano. From the sound of it, several keys were missing and the rest were untuned, but the pianist was nevertheless eliciting from them an energetic and playful boogie-woogie.

  A long bar underscored the entire right hand wall, with a handful of men slouched on barstools or standing next to it. A bartender moved through the murky air, his faceless black shadow twinned in a cloudy back-bar mirror.

  Calypso stood swaying indecisively in the dusk midway between the door and the bar, taking it all in, her entire being alert for trouble. Rat was nowhere in sight.

  A brief image of her abandoned backpack flashed through her mind, where it sat inside the entrance to the tube, and where it might remain for all eternity until it became petrified. It was a mark of the trauma she had been through that she had abandoned her identification, credit cards, money, and even her cherished pocketknife and lipstick. Now, she was so hungry she felt faint, but how would she buy food?

  “No dogs allowed, lady.” The shout shocked her into the present. The bartender was coming from behind the bar, wiping his hands on a limp towel. He pointed to the door. “Get that mutt out of here.”

  Calypso stood frozen to the spot, shaking her head.

  “I…” Her knees felt weak and her brain too tired to function. “I…” she tried again.

  “Just get it out of here,” the bartender insisted.

  He reached to grab Lobo by the scruff of the neck. Instantly the wolf crouched, his teeth bared, and a menacing growl rumbled from his chest, audible even over the jaunty clanking of the piano. The bartender jerked his hand back. Sudden silence fell over the bar and all eyes turned to take in the action.

  Calypso mustered her strength and said with dignity, “He’s not a dog. He’s a wolf.”

  “In that case,” a voice behind her said, “I say the animal stays.”

  Calypso felt her strength give way and her knees begin to buckle. She turned toward her defender, already toppling. When she collapsed, she fell straight into the arms of Javier Carteña.

  §

  He carried her to a table back in the shadows near the piano, where he sat with her on his lap. Her hands were dug into his sides like grappling hooks, and her tears had already soaked his shirt front. The longer he held her, the sobs, instead of diminishing, became more torrential.

  Like a dam bursting, the accumulated sorrows, terrors and grief of the past days poured forth incoherently. Her mind was blank as a wiped slate, but her animal body was acutely aware of his animal body—the specific warmth and steeliness of his chest, his feral scent, the cherishing lock of his arms around her.

  Her entire life and world were collapsed into their united being like that compacted matter said to exist in space, so dense that one cubic centimeter, if dropped on Earth, would pass right through it and out the other side.

  Javier rested his chin on top of her head and let the magnitude of her emotions flow into his scorched and blackened interior. Nothing else mattered now. It was all inconsequential. The house could be rebuilt. The land and its people defended. In time, all could be even better and stronger than before.

  Calypso’s miraculous appearance was his wellspring and her tears were priming
the pump. Where she had been, what she had experienced he did not yet know, but he would find a way to heal it. With her by his side, everything again was possible.

  §

  They lay in the narrow, lumpy bed of a nameless motel planted in the desert beside a section of highway long bypassed by a freeway. In the room next door, a drunken couple were arguing, their inchoate mutterings and shouts penetrating the thin walls like the rumbling of beasts. The bedclothes stank of mildew and cigarette smoke and the carpet gave off the sickly sweet odor of cheap cleaner. On it, Lobo stretched beside Calypso’s side of the bed sound asleep.

  To them, it might have been the antechamber to heaven—or to hell. They were heedless of all things future, knowing only the present, with its endless possibilities for mutual intermingling. They lay wrapped into one another, their bodies annealed by sweat and tears.

  “What’s this?” Calypso asked, frowning as she ran her hand over a large welt on Javier’s arm.

  “Just a burn. It got pretty hot up on the wall while the house was burning.”

  Calypso shuddered. “My God, Javier!”

  “And what about this?” He ran a tentative finger over a bruise that ran from her left cheek up into her hairline. It was the brooding purple of an eggplant and stippled with small scabs.

  “I fell climbing the cliff. The pitons ripped out.”

  “Pitons? Plural?”

  “Three, I think.”

  “My God, Caleepso!” He wrapped her closer to him. “You could have died.”

  “I considered it. But then, so could you.”

  They lay tangled in one another, contemplating how close they had come to losing one another, until mere proximity soothed them. Between long periods of pure, silent rapture, they told bits of their stories, attempting to piece together the puzzle of the last few days.

  “So it was that little guy—how you call him? Rat?—he brought you to the bar?”

  “Did you see that beat-up Cadillac in the parking lot when we came in? He brought me in that. That’s probably him next door, wooing his lady.”

  “I can’t believe that car could make it through the desert.”

  “Neither can I.” She explained about the contents of the trunk. “Besides being a rolling bomb, it was the Ride of the Valkyries and The Charge of the Light Brigade meet Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and a drug-addled Rolling Stones concert.”

  Javier chuckled and kissed her forehead. They were silent for a moment, fitting that piece into the developing picture.

  “Was anyone hurt, Javier? In the battle? Our people, I mean?” She tensed, awaiting the worst.

  “Yes. Juan was shot in the arm, and Martín has a head wound. It’s not too bad. They’ll recover.” He could feel Calypso’s body relax. Then her hand stole over his chest and down his length.

  “I can feel that everything is in good working order here,” she murmured.

  “Woe-man!” he growled, fending her off. But it was too late. Despite their exhaustion, their bodies demanded a deeper reunion and with squealing and listing bed springs, they obliged.

  §

  In the morning, ravaged by hunger, they went to the slovenly diner attached to the motel. The waitress, wearing a greasy apron over an unwashed uniform, dramatic false eyelashes, and metallic gold flats covered in food spots, frowned at them as they pushed through the door.

  “May we let Lobo come in?” Calypso asked, holding the door ajar, with the wolf’s long nose inserted in the crack.

  The waitress shrugged. “Whatever.”

  Calypso glanced into a steam- and grease-clouded mirror behind the counter as they took a booth. She was still in the mud-crusted clothes she’d worn in the cave. With wet hair, no makeup, a glowering bruise, and her face gleaming with the rancid hand cream supplied by the motel, she looked spectral. Javier had been wearing the same shirt and jeans for days, smeared with soot and blood, and his face, above a field of stubble, was haggard.

  “Now there’s a pair to draw to!” Calypso laughed.

  Javier, gazing at her across the table, took her hands in his. “You are the most beautiful sight the world,” he said earnestly.

  They ordered outrageous quantities of food—steak, fried eggs, bacon, waffles, pancakes and biscuits and gravy, and a plate of machaca for Lobo. Even the watery coffee tasted ambrosial to them.

  “So I still don’t understand,” Javier said to her as their breakfast was cooking. “Where were you before you were with Rat?”

  “I was in the cave.”

  “Yes, but how did you get from the cave to Rat’s place?”

  “I…” A frown creased her forehead. She set her coffee cup down with a puzzled look. “I…” she began again.

  “I know you weren’t in the safe house in Batopilas,” Javier prompted. “That was the first place I looked.”

  Calypso shook her head slowly. “It’s very strange but I don’t remember. I was just suddenly there in Rat’s car and we were racing through the desert.”

  “I called Hill in Paris. He remembers saying goodbye to us at the house before he left for the airport.”

  “But he was in the cave with me.”

  “I know. Pedro told me.”

  The waitress approached with the first round of food. She set the plates down, slammed a bottle of catsup in the middle of the table and departed. Calypso slipped the plate of machaca under the table and was gratified to hear Lobo’s greedy lapping. She and Javier attacked their breakfasts as if they were wolves themselves.

  “It makes no sense,” Calypso said, gesturing with her fork. “If Hill was with me in the cave, then he couldn’t have said goodbye at the house, because while we were in the cave, the house was burning.”

  “Exactly,” Javier agreed as he sliced into his steak. “I told him that but he insisted. I started to suspect he was hiding you in Paris. I wanted to go there but my passport burned up.”

  “So how did you end up in the bar last night?”

  “That’s another strange thing. The owner, Bill Hartman—the guy who was playing the piano last night?—he called my cell phone. He said he had important information for me—too important to say over an open line. He said to come to the bar, so I did.”

  “Did you know him? Before this, I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Weren’t you afraid it was a trap?”

  “It was a possibility.”

  “But you came anyway.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then I arrived.”

  “Yes.”

  They stared into one another’s eyes, mystified.

  “Maybe we could ask Rat,” Calypso suggested.

  “I thought of that but his car’s already gone.”

  The second round of food arrived, and Calypso spread the entire paper cup’s-worth of whipped margarine over her waffle while she thought.

  “None of this makes sense,” she said flatly.

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “Where are we, by the way? I mean, is this the US or Mexico?”

  “We’re right on the border. I think we might be a couple of miles inside the US.”

  “But that’s over two hundred miles from the ranch! And there was no border crossing.”

  Javier laughed. “How do you think all the drugs get across? My guess is your friend Rat is one of the guys who ferries them. And it’s closer to three hundred miles.”

  Calypso poured a flood of syrup onto her waffle. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Try to remember. Where did you find Lobo?”

  “He was in the cave.”

  “Where in the cave?”

  “All the way. He was with me all the way. I had to haul him up the cliff, after the tube.”

  “Think, Caleepso. When did you first see him?”

  Calypso put her fork down and gazed out the steamy window into the bleak dirt parking area, backtracking in her mind’s eye. It was like trying to remember a dream, teasing out its details.

  “He came t
hrough the tube after El Lobo,” she said finally.

  “After who?”

  “El Lobo. He was a very bad man, and he was in the cave with me.”

  “Why?”

  Calypso sat and thought, then shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  “Maybe you have a concussion. Did he hit you?”

  Calypso ran her hand over her head. “It doesn’t hurt anywhere, except from the fall.”

  “What happened to him? Why is Lobo with you instead of with his master?”

  “Because…”

  Calypso frowned with the effort of remembering.

  “Because…”

  Then it hit her. The image of El Lobo’s agonized face as he was sucked down the siphon filled her mind. She put her hand across her mouth, feeling she might vomit.

  “Oh God!”

  “What, Caleepso? What?”

  Several puzzle pieces came together at once.

  “I went through the cave with Hill. Then we camped at the grotto. In the morning, El Lobo came. He came up really close to me and he blew something in my face. And then I was in the cave again and instead of Hill, El Lobo was with me and he fell in the whirlpool. Then I climbed the cliff and saw that the house was gone and I thought you were dead, and then I went back into the cave and Lobo was lying on the edge of the whirlpool, even though I was sure he was sucked down, because El Lobo was hanging onto him…”

  She stopped to take a breath, her startled eyes glazed with tears.

  “My God, Javier!” she finished. She put her hand to her forehead and stared into her plate of half-eaten waffle, deeply shaken.

  “Scopolamine,” Javier responded succinctly.

  “What?” Her eyes were suddenly alert.

  “Scopolamine. They blow it in your face and you forget what you do next. You lose your own will and do whatever they ask you to do.”

  She was nodding, her face filled with remembering.

  “Yes. Yes, I think you’re right. There are images…people. They’re swimming around in my mind. Insubstantial, like…like ghosts.”

  “That’s why Hill can’t remember either. They must have given him a hypnotic suggestion while he was under the drug. He really believes he said goodbye to us at the ranch, but I thought he was lying to protect you.”