The unspoken, additional motive — I wanted to watch our tail for a time ... make sure we were not being shadowed by frat boys; Texas Republicans; by machine-gun toting banditos or old Mexican ghosts nicknamed “the Butcher.”
17
The desk clerk was missing an arm. I asked, “Korea?”
The maimed clerk shook his head. “Naw. Parachuting into Corregidor, February of ’45.”
“You’re older than you look,” I said.
“That’s ’cause I can’t drink with both fists anymore. They shot it off before I hit the ground,” he said.
I thanked him for his war service. There was some awkwardness after that.
Two rooms?
Three?
We ended up with two. Me and Fiske ostensibly in one room, Alicia in the other ... a connecting door between them.
But Fiske, bless him, said he wanted to get some notes organized, then he essentially commandeered one of the rooms, leaving Alicia and me together in the other. I had to smile at Bud’s excuse that he needed time with his notes for his article — as if he could truly print anything about what had been happening to us these past forty-eight or so hours.
It was real publish-and-perish stuff — write it down and you’d likely face indictment and the chair. Hell, we’d maybe face a firing squad if they extradited us to Mexico for killing those federales. But good ole Ike would never let that happen. The U.S. doesn’t deport it’s own gringos to mere Mexico, regardless of what bad things they might have done down there.
As Alicia drew her bath, Bud and I talked, sharing a couple more cigarettes and some decaffeinated coffee. The sound of her bathwater being drawn was like a siren’s song ... so hard to resist. But I hung in there.
Bud slipped off his jacket. He rolled up his sleeves a couple of turns. Unfastening his watch, he accidentally dropped it on the carpet. As he reached to retrieve it, his sleeve rode up. It was like a shot to the kidney:
Christ, Are those fucking needle scars there just below the crook of his elbow?
My stomach knotted tighter. Easy: could be a trick of diabetes-afflicted vision, I told myself. But I filed it away. I’d be watching. Particularly since this kid had my back. I sure as hell didn’t need some junkie Tonto. And I really didn’t need some inverted Sherlock Holmes and Watson relationship with the great detective’s sidekick doing all the shooting up.
“Hard to know when we’ll get another chance to get some sleep, kiddo,” I said, trying to sound friendly — just like always. “So you try and get some rest, Bud.”
Fiske shook his head. “You should talk.”
I backed out, smiling and closing the connecting door between us.
The bathroom door opened. Steam rolled out through the widening crack. Alicia was wearing one of my shirts, the sleeves rolled up several turns at each arm. And those rolled up sleeves instantly reminded me of my worries regarding Fiske. Fuck!
She pulled a comb through her damp black hair, making tracks, and sat on the foot of the bed, tucking one dusky leg up under the other. I saw a flash of white cotton panties, and, just like that, Bud Fiske was forgotten.
Alicia smiled uncertainly. “Everything is all right, Héctor?”
“Getting there.” I rubbed my chin; two days without shaving. I could feel — hell, I could smell — the dust and sweat on my skin and hair. And, of course, I was saturated in the stench of all of that cordite and nicotine. “Gonna grab me a shower.” I smiled, shrugging and unbuttoning my shirt. “You don’t have to wait up.”
Alicia flashed a knowing smile. “No, I don’t.”
* * *
I finished shaving and sourly appraised myself in the mirror.
Regardéz: Hector Lassiter at fifty-seven.
The liquor was maybe a week away from putting some worrisome and irreversible weight on me. The capillaries in my nose and cheeks looked like they were ready to go. My once dark brown hair had faded to brindle and was now well on its way to gray.
I wasn’t the man I remembered being ... or at least not the guy I remembered thinking I was. No longer the man who could clear a bar or win the heart of any woman for at least the long week it would take her to tumble to the kind of man I really am.
No longer the man who could endlessly write words that burned.
I hitched a towel around my waist and padded out, massaging my aching ribs.
I sat down on the bed. Alicia had the sheet up over her breasts. I stroked her bare shoulder. “You sure about this?” I asked. “I’m old enough —”
Alicia pressed her hand to my mouth and said, “You’re old enough to know what to do.”
She turned the radio on, presumably to set the mood and maybe spare Bud the sounds through the walls.
Johnny Cash for the nervous talk, “Give My Love To Rose.”
Foreplay: Mathis crooning “Chances Are”; Sam Cooke and “You Send Me.” Tender, slow kisses and caressing hands. Holding close, moving slow and hard together, her arms tight around me; her legs wrapped around me too, making me forget, at least for that long, how much my ribs hurt.
Afterward, hearts pounding at one another: Patsy Cline, “Walkin’ After Midnight” ... Peggy Lee and “Don’t Smoke in Bed.”
All my scars — my new, Mexican darling raised her black eyebrows, her fingertips tracing the welts, the knife-blade furrows, the bullet holes and the ancient cigarette burns. She lingered longest on the crisscrossed whip scars covering my back and wondered aloud, “How in God’s name?”
“You really don’t wanna know.”
Based on past experience, I’d made some of observations of my own. She’d had at least one child. I risked sharing my theory on that.
“Her name is Azucena,” Alicia confirmed with a sad smile. “Well, that’s her real and private name, anyway. She’s got my coloring, but blue eyes and sandy hair. I’m hoping she’ll pass ... so her name to the world is Jessica. She’s living with my mother while I try to make us some more money.”
“How long since you saw her last?”
“Almost a month.”
God. “How old is she?”
“Three.”
My stomach kicked. “Three is an important age. They start to get really interesting then. Start becoming the person they will be. You should try to work things out so you can be with her now ... shape her.”
Alicia smiled sadly. “The money...”
“What about her father? What happened there?”
“Not sure. I was attacked outside the restaurant in L.A. where I was working, on Hope Street. There were three of them. They dragged me into an alley and...”
Now I was on fire. “They were never caught?”
“No. Me being Mexican, I not sure how hard the police looked, you know?”
I knew. My big fingers combed through her glistening black hair. I asked her some questions about her child, about where she lived in Los Angeles ... eventually drew out her mother’s name and general location. I committed them to memory. It was just enough for me to track her down proper later, when this bandit’s head stuff was wrapped up. I’d know soon enough where to start sending the money.
And, Christ, but my house back in New Mexico felt so empty. Maybe I could just move ’em all in ... Alicia and her baby girl ... and abulea. Fill that old hacidena with life again. Get a dog. Yeah ... so comforting to dream. Hemingway ambushed me suddenly: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
“Pretty to think what?” Her brow wrinkled.
Holy Christ, I was monologing out loud — must really be getting senile. I shook my head, tracing the line of her jaw with my scarred and bruised hand. “Pretty to think how it would be if I was twenty years younger ... the life we might have had together.”
Her fingers traced the lines around my mouth. “Those dimples of yours. When you smile, you look twenty years younger, Héctor. You should just smile more often.”
“I need a reason.”
“Haven’t I given you one?” She nestled in, her breasts pressed to
my chest, her arm enveloping my aching ribs, her thigh drawn up over my thighs. We fell into a deep sleep to the sound of rain.
18
We awakened to an explosion.
There was a sharp report outside ... could have been a gunshot, or maybe just a car backfiring. It was unexpected, so I couldn’t be sure, either way.
I slipped from the bed and stepped into my pants. I scooped up my Colt and edged to the window. There was the glare of morning sunlight through the L.A. smog, but nothing particularly sinister in sight out there. I edged over to the connecting door, tapped once and then opened it.
Bud Fiske was sitting on the foot of the bed, naked to the waist. His hair was wet and slicked back from the shower. He was just replacing the hypodermic in its case. His left arm and his belly were riddled with scars. I tossed aside my gun and dove for him, trying to get my hands around his scrawny neck. Two words snarled from my twisting mouth: “Fucking junkie!”
Fiske screamed, “No!” and got his hands up and blocked my hands from getting to his throat. He kneed me in the crotch and we both tumbled off the side of the bed. I hit the floor first, right on my rickety ribs. The impact robbed me of my wind. Fiske slid his leg over me and got his hands around my wrists, trying to pin me down. It worked for about a minute. But I had two inches and a hundred pounds, easy, on Bud Fiske. I upended him, scrambled atop him and finally got a grip on his throat. The skinny bastard squeaked out, “I’m di —”
I squeezed harder and cut off his air, snarling, “That’s right you fucking traitor junkie, you are gonna die.”
I felt this sharp crack behind my ear and saw lights.
I reached to the back of my throbbing head, tumbling off Bud Fiske. As I rolled onto my back I saw Alicia, wrapped in a sheet. The copper ice bucket she’d taken from the bathroom sink and hit me with fell to the carpet.
She said, “Are you all right?”
She asked that as she ran to Bud Fiske.
Fiske struggled up onto on elbow, rubbing his neck with this other hand. I struggled up too.
The young poet, my trellis-thin Boswell, took one look at me, cocked and let fly. His right caught me just under the left eye. I saw stars again. Fiske grabbed a handful of my graying hair. He was all lion now. He snarled into my face, “I’m a fucking diabetic, Hector! I tried to tell you, you cocksucker. I’m a fucking diabetic!” He let go of my hair and my head bounced on the tile floor. I saw more stars.
Alicia helped Fiske to his feet.
He picked up his hypodermic vial. “Insulin, Hector,” he said. “It’s insulin, not fucking heroin. Jesus Christ, Hector.”
I struggled up onto my elbows. “Alicia, sweetheart, leave us alone a minute,” I said, rubbing my eye. “Please? Just give me a minute with Bud?” Her eyes were still blazing at me — like she really hated me.
She glanced at Fiske and asked, “Do you want to be alone with him, Bud?”
“Sí. Gracias, Alicia.”
She smiled uncertainly. “De nada.” She bent over, holding the sheet over her swaying breasts with her left arm. With her right hand, she picked up the copper bucket she’d brained me with and tossed it to Fiske. “Just in case, yes?”
He smiled and pitched the pail onto the bed. “I can handle myself.”
Alicia backed out and closed the connecting door behind her. Fiske shrugged into his shirt and buttoned up past the needle scars on his belly. He extended a hand and I took it. He wrapped his other arm around me and helped me to my feet. My ribs hurt ... my eye hurt ... my cheek hurt ... my head hurt. And I felt sick inside. “Kid,” I groaned, “I’m so fucking sorry.”
“Yeah,” Fiske said. “Sure. Now you know why I’m so attuned to your own sugar problems — first-hand experience.”
“I get it now.”
“What if it had been the other way? What would it be to you?” Bud shook his head. “Christ, Hector, I’ve seen you put away a bottle of whiskey a day — sometimes along with a couple of beers or a bottle of wine. You smoke two packs a day, easy. You’ve got more than your share of monkeys clinging to that scarred back of yours. So what’s it to you if I was shooting smack?”
I limped to the side table and liberated a couple of Bud’s cigarettes. I picked up the hotel’s complimentary book of safety matches and struck one and fired us both up. I set an ashtray between us on the chenille bedspread and shook the match out and dropped it in.
“We off the record, Bud?”
“Sure.”
“I mean it, friend.” I don’t expect he felt much like a friend about then, but I plunged on as though he was. From my direction he was. Maybe even more than a friend, now. “Nobody gets this story but you,” I said. “And you never share it, right? Swear?”
“On my life, Hector. But the talk about what happened between you and your wife has been out there for a while ... you know that.”
“But not the reasons...and I’ve never confirmed the other — my wife’s addiction — not to anyone, Bud. My wife, Maria, was a heroin addict. For years. She hid it well from me. She shot up between her toes. Through the soles of her feet. Under her arms so the scars could be confused for razor stubble. Shot up through her pubic hair when she could will herself to do it.”
No words needed there. Bud just nodded, sucked down some smoke.
“That was bad enough. But my daughter, Dolores, she was born with a hole in her heart ... and other birth defects. From day one, it was just one thing after another for my little girl. Eventually, the latest in a long line of doctors told me he thought my daughter’s problems might be a result of her mother’s addiction. Meant to warn me off having other kids with Maria, I guess. Almost on first meeting with my wife, that particular sawbones correctly deduced what I had never suspected ... even though I lived with the woman, and slept with her. The doc knew when he looked at Maria. I didn’t know until he told me. He broke the news just a few hours before my little girl died of the birth defects caused by my wife’s addiction. I confronted Maria later, after we lost Dolores, and she confessed it all. Then Maria tried to turn me into a junkie.”
Bud sat there, perched on the end of the bed, waiting to see if I’d go the distance ... maybe confess complicity in my wife’s infamous overdose.
But I’d gone as far as I was prepared to. “So,” I said, blowing smoke through both nostrils, “that’s why I attacked you when I saw the needle and all those scars. When I got a glimpse of the scars on your arm last night when you reached for your watch. It ate at me. Then walking in here this morning and seeing all your scars ... seeing that damned needle and hypo ... well, you know.... took me back to bad places. I made a shitty deduction and acted on it.”
“I understand how it could happen.” I hadn’t gone far enough for him.
“I’m so fucking sorry, kid.” I went ahead and said what I thought he must be thinking. “I might have killed you if Alicia hadn’t brained me with that damned bucket...”
“You might have,” Bud said. He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. I heard a click and a swish. He held the switchblade up to catch the morning light through the window. “Or I might have killed you, Hector. I was in the process of deciding when she hit you.”
I took a deep breath and rubbed my eye.
All right then.
I said, “Good. That’s good, Bud. There won’t be a next time, but if there ever was ... don’t hesitate.”
Bud smiled. “I ain’t saying ‘likewise.’”
I laughed and stood up, cracking all over. I extended my hand. “We’re okay then?”
Bud took my hand and shook it. “We drive on.” He nodded at the wall between our rooms. “What do you tell her, though?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Bud slipped on his socks, tugged on his new boots and snagged his room key. He put on his hat and clipped some shades over his glasses. “Use my shower. Clean up. I’ll take her to breakfast ... patch things up for you.”
I searched his eyes behind the sunglasses. “You
sure about that?”
“Leave it to me, Hector.”
Would Bud tell Alicia what I’d just confided to him? Probably ... if he thought it was necessary to mend things. But maybe he’d be so smooth it wouldn’t be needed. Hell, he was a fucking poet, after all. And I was past caring, either way. “I’ll owe you three times, then,” I said.
Bud Fiske said, “How do you figure?”
“You’ve saved me three times. Once in Mexico, putting that pic in the federale’s eye; a few minutes ago, when you had every right to shiv me and chose not to; and making things okay with Alicia again.”
“Haven’t done the last yet.” He smiled and shook his head, his hand on the doorknob. “Hector, do you deliberately make a mess of your life just to keep yourself interested?”
I chuckled and shook my head. “Kid,” I said, “you’re the first person in this screwed up excuse for a world to really get my act. Well, the first who isn’t a woman to get it.”
Bud Fiske smiled sadly. “My God,” he said, “what a terrible way to live.” He hesitated, then said, “You know, there’s a big difference between living for the moment and really trying to live in the moment, all the fucking time, Hector. The first is just wrong-headed and shallow. The latter is not only impossible, it’s downright dangerous.”
I remembered something Hemingway said to me in Captain Tony’s so many years ago. I said it aloud: “We all have a right to hurt ourselves.”
“No,” Bud said. “It’s plenty dangerous to you living like that, but it’s also dangerous to the poor bastards closest to you. It’s not right for you to choose for them.”
I shrugged. “Maybe not. But you know, Bud, poets have to try to live in every moment ... and then live to write about it. It’s the path you’ve chosen for yourself. You may not know it yet, but that’s the truth. Got to feed the beast; feed the hungry muse so she’ll spread her legs for you.”
He nodded, but looked skeptical.
19
After Bud left I sat there, staring at my hands. They were blurring out on me again.
Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 7