Beneath a Panamanian Moon

by David Terrenoire

  He caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “How’d you know?”

  “You and Alonzo dropped the dime.”

  Ren nodded; his eyes were back on the road but I knew he was seeing Alonzo. I knew because that’s what I was seeing, too. It was impossible not to see Alonzo sitting against that car, all that blood thick on his shirt. Impossible.

  Ren spoke quietly and I had to strain to hear him over the noise of the wind and the car. “Alonzo knew a guy in Washington, so we said maybe this place was worth a look, that’s all. And then Winstead was getting us a layout of a site that Kelly had built in the jungle. That’s when we knew something bad was happening, man.” Ren took another hit and flicked the roach out the window. “But they’re not going to get me, because I am about to vámanos my ass outta here like pronto. I’m getting some money today from a guy who owes me, and after we run this errand, I want you to drop me off in town, okay? By tonight I’ll be back in the States eating my mom’s cooking.”

  He reached across the car to the glove compartment, nearly toppling the kitchen chair sideways. The car swerved into the left lane, barely missing a truck full of chickens. Ren pulled out a .45 and threw it in the back seat.

  “Hold on to this.”

  “What for?”

  “In case you need it, that’s what the fuck for.”

  “Like that dime in your ear.”

  “A man never knows.”

  Ren drove down the Avenue of Martyrs. He turned right, into narrow streets, the traffic slow with bicycles, taxis, buses, trucks, and cars. Ren turned right again, into a dirt street crowded with shacks made of flattened tin and scrap aluminum. We inched in and out of ruts, avoiding kids and dogs playing in the muddy pools of afternoon rain. As we passed by open doors the people watched from the hot darkness inside, their eyes white in the shadows.

  “I don’t like this, Ren.”

  Ren stopped the car. “C’mon, man. Just be cool. Put your shirt over that gun. All I want you to do is stand by the door and look like a killer.”

  “What if someone wants to come in?”

  “Then you shoot ’em. Cock and lock, brother man.”

  I pulled the slide, chambered a round, and locked the hammer. I snicked the safety up with my thumb and tucked the gun into my belt. I thought of Smith and how he worried about shooting off something he’d miss.

  Ren wasn’t tall, but he had to duck to get in the door. The tin house looked as if it might not make it past the next stiff breeze. I waited outside and tried to look hard. Kids gathered around me, curious about the gringo with his hand in his pants.

  “Vamoose,” I said, shooing them away with my left hand. “Go away.” I looked up and down the street and wondered how I had gotten myself into this. If Smith had shown his saggy white ass in that alley that afternoon, I might have shot him. Maybe not to kill him, but shot him in one of those parts he was so afraid he’d miss.

  I waited for what felt like days. Where was Ren? I poked my head in the door, just to see what was taking so long. It was dark, and my eyes hadn’t adjusted completely, but I could make out Ren and another man. Then I saw that the other man had a gun. I watched the man turn and point the gun at me. I saw a flash of light, then heard the shot. Even in the tight chamber of the tin house, where the noise was amplified, the calm, analytical part of my brain registered it as small, possibly a .32. The wooden doorframe splintered and everything went from too slow to too fast. Far too fast.

  I dropped in the doorway and struggled to free the .45 from my pants. Another shot sprayed dirt in my eyes. I pulled the big automatic clear but I didn’t know where to shoot. The room was dark. I was blinded by the muzzle flash and people were moving. I didn’t want to hit Ren. All I wanted was to get out of there.

  That calm part of my brain, the part that had paid attention to all of my expensive training, told me to lay down suppressing fire. My vision returned enough to see Ren’s shape in front of me, kneeling on the dirt floor with a small automatic clutched in both hands. Ren didn’t shoot. The man turned and aimed his pistol at Ren’s head. Ren still didn’t shoot.

  I pulled the trigger three times and the boom of the .45 rang the tin hut like a bell. I got to my knees, pulled Ren after me, and, one-handed, fired twice more into the shack. Big holes blew sunlight into the far wall.

  “Go, man, go!” Ren was behind me now, up and out of the hut, running for the car. I saw the man’s shadow rise up from behind the overturned table. He was a perfect silhouette, just like a range target. I pulled the trigger again and lost him in the lightning.

  Ren had the engine started and I jumped headfirst through the open passenger window. I hit the kitchen chair with my shoulder and rolled into the back, onto the floor. The rear window exploded into a thousand sparkles of sidewalk diamonds. I blew my last two rounds into the alley just to discourage anyone from chasing us.

  The Chevy jumped forward. The kitchen chair tipped and Ren fell back on top of me and hung there, a turtle unable to right himself, his arms and his feet waving helplessly in the air as the Chevy rolled down the narrow street, sideswiping tin. I hollered, “One of us has to drive,” and pushed Ren upright behind the wheel.

  I put my head up slowly, and saw the man running, getting closer. He was shooting. Christ, he was shooting at me. A bullet thunked hard into the roof of the car. Thank you, Jesus, he was shooting high.

  Ren, finally in control of the careening Chevrolet, blasted through the shanties, hanging on to the wheel, swerving between houses too close, rocking from one side to the next, a gutter ball scattering children like chickens. Ren spun the wheels, adding mud and dog shit to the open misery of these poor people’s homes, and five minutes later we were back on the paved city streets. Ren parked outside an open-air bar. He turned off the engine and we both sat in the car, not talking and not really listening to the music from a jukebox down the street. My heart beat like a prisoner inside my chest, demanding a safer home.

  “You okay?” I asked, afraid to look and see blood. Please, I didn’t want to see any more blood, not for a very long time.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “What the fuck happened back there?” I said, my voice high on adrenaline. “I can’t stop shaking. I’m shaking like a dog shitting cinders!”

  “Shitting cinders? What the fuck’s that? A dog shitting cinders?” Ren laughed. It was a high, tight laugh that danced away on the salsa.

  “I don’t know. What? You want to discuss regional idioms now? Is that it? Jesus Christ, we almost get killed and you turn into William fucking Safire?”

  “Who?”

  “He writes for the Times.”

  “What are you talking about, man? What Times?”

  “Forget it,” I said. I started to feel my limbs and lips again. I put my hand against my forehead. I was cold, near shock.

  “Fuck, man,” Ren said, “you think you hit him?”

  “No. I didn’t hit him. Thank God I didn’t hit him.”

  “Whatta you mean? He was trying to kill us. Why didn’t you waste him?”

  I wanted to ask Ren the same question but I knew the answer. It’s not easy pulling the trigger on another man, no matter how they make it look in the movies. “I just wanted it to stop,” I said. “That’s all. I was scared.”

  “No shit, man. You got that straight.”

  “What happened?” I shook pieces of glass out of my hair.

  “Dude wouldn’t give me my money.” Ren held up a tight roll of bills. “But I got this. Looks like even more than he owed me, the stupid asshole.”

  “You almost got me killed.”

  “Nah.” Ren looked back at me and grinned. “Wasn’t even close.” Then he took a deep breath and said, “You did okay, Monkeyman. You did okay. I knew you were all right.”

  When I figured I could hold a drink without spilling it, we went into the bar. I ordered two scotches, on the rocks. Ren ordered the same. We sat and drank them in silence.

  Finally, Ren said, “C’m
on, man. We still gotta run the Colonel’s errand. Then you gotta drop me off, okay?”

  “I could take you to the airport,” I said.

  “No, I can get a ride from one of the hotels.”

  “What about your stuff? Your clothes?”

  “In the trunk, my man, I am ready to fly.”

  We got in the car and Ren drove to a square of warehouses on the other side of the Old City. The street ran three blocks to a chain-link dead end. Beyond the fence was the sea, and the water glittered, turquoise in the sun, and made the day seem innocent of shootings and squalor and espionage. Most of the warehouses were abandoned, their doors open on empty bays. Rust, the industrial moss, spread across galvanized walls and stained the concrete foundations with runoff. Weeds grew tall and litter piled in drifts against chain link. At the very end of the street, a military truck with no markings, its bed covered in canvas, sat backed against a loading dock. Several men in tan work clothes carried wooden crates out of the truck and into the hot shadows of a warehouse.

  A man with a mustache stood near the tailgate, smoking a cigarette and occasionally checking items off on a clipboard. He had a .45 on his belt. I noticed another man near the front of the truck armed with an M-14 rifle.

  Ren parked the car, got out and spoke in Spanish to the man with the clipboard. I crawled out of the back and walked up the street, away from the warehouse. The smell of gas in the car was making me sick. Still shaky from Ren’s business, I needed a little open air.

  A man came out from the warehouse with a cardboard carton the size of a shoebox. He carried it to the car and crawled into the back seat. Ren signed something on the clipboard. He waved at me and headed for the car. The other man got out.

  “Hey!”

  I turned around and saw Phil hiding in the narrow space between two warehouses, his back against one wall and out of view of the men loading the truck.

  “Hey, Harp, don’t look this way.”

  I walked over to the warehouse wall and feigned taking a whiz. When I glanced over my shoulder I could see the man with the rifle watching me.

  “What the fuck you doing here?”

  “Running an errand for the Colonel. Me and Ren.”

  “This is not the place to be, Harp.”

  “I got that feeling.” The man was walking toward me now. He said something to the man with the .45.

  “Just get in the car and get the fuck out of here.”

  “Okay. Here comes Ren.” I pretended to shake it and zip. I waited for Ren to drive up the street so I could get in. I didn’t want to walk any closer to the men with the guns. I’d had enough guns for the day.

  Ren drove to the end of the block to turn around. Ren wasn’t the best driver, even when straight, so it took a while. I watched from the end of the block as Ren went up on the curb and ran into the chain-link fence. He put the car in reverse, grinding gears and twisting the steering wheel left and right. He had his head hung out the window like a big dog, trying to see around the back end of the Chevy.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Turning around.”

  The car came closer. Ren drove between the nose of the truck and the other loading docks. The Chevy rolled slowly toward me. The two men who had been watching had disappeared and the street was empty. Ren was driving carefully, afraid to tip the chair or run into anything expensive.

  When Ren was about twenty yards away, I could feel something bad creep up my throat. For the second time that day, time slowed to a crawl. The heat waves in their shimmer. The rolling litter in a gust of hot wind. Ren’s face, split by a stoner’s smile. And when the car exploded, I watched the yellow ball of flame erupt and blow out all of the windows. I don’t remember being tossed to the ground. I do remember Phil beside me, helping me up. The car exploded a second time and hot twisted chunks of ’56 Chevy, big and little, rattled against the warehouse walls like shrapnel. Phil fell on top of me, shielding me with his body.

  The men in the warehouse came out and shouted at us over the roar of the fire. Phil jerked me to my feet. I looked at the blazing heap of blackened metal, flames roaring around the frame, black smoke rising quickly into the sky. The doors had been blown open and slammed backward on their hinges. The trunk lid was torn completely off and it lay in the street, a curved sheet of smoking steel. The other thing was something I didn’t really want to see, but I did. I saw Ren. He was a torch, a black silhouette inside yellow flames, perched upright on a kitchen chair. His teeth were white.

  “C’mon, man, we got to get you out of here.” Phil was pulling me between two abandoned buildings. I was still dazed, unable to make one thought connect to another. I saw the man with the rifle take aim.

  I tried to shout but I couldn’t make a sound come out of my throat. The man fired and the bullet tore a chunk of concrete out of the warehouse foundation. Phil pulled me again and together we ran, me stumbling, my ribs as sharp as razors.

  I don’t know how far we ran. I just kept my eyes on his back and ran like I did in the jungle. I stumbled across vacant lots and railroad tracks, past boarded-up buildings, down deserted streets, and up foul-smelling alleyways.

  When we reached a busy street we stopped running and walked a few feet to the edge of a small park filled with children playing soccer on a concrete field. There were benches under scruffy trees. We sat down, and I tried to catch my breath. Phil was breathing deeply, but easily. I had my elbows on my knees, afraid I was going to throw up.

  “Look what I found,” Phil said. He held out his fist and turned it over, like a magician about to reveal a little sleight of hand. When Phil opened his palm, a spark of sunlight flashed off a silver disc.

  It was a dime. A Roosevelt dime. Nothing unusual. Just a dime.

  I went down on all fours and tossed my guts in the street like a dog.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When I couldn’t be sick anymore, I sat down again and we watched the kids kick the soccer ball from one end of the park to the other.

  “You ready to go?”

  I said I was.

  Phil hailed a taxi at the curb and we climbed inside. There were Christmas lights around the windshield and an illuminated picture of the Virgin Mary on the dash.

  “Hey, you guys want to see exhibition?” the cab driver asked, his eyes on us in the rearview.

  “No. You know a place called the Chinaman’s Drugstore?”

  “Sí, señor. But first we go to exhibition, eh?”

  “No. The Chinaman’s Drugstore. No exhibition,” Phil said.

  “Okay, but you miss good show.” The cab pulled quickly into traffic, forcing a bus to swerve into the oncoming lane.

  “What’s he talking about?”

  “It’s a sex show,” Phil said. “Juanita and her trained Chihuahua.”

  “Every night is opening night.” The driver grinned.

  Phil looked out the window. Anger rolled off him like stream.

  “Big time,” said the driver. “New show. Get to see donkey fuck gringo.”

  Phil smacked the back of the seat. “Hey, asshole. You want to see a gringo fuck a cab driver?”

  “Okay, okay,” the driver said. “Some pipple,” he muttered, “got a’solutely no ’preciation of de finer tings.”

  We rode for a few blocks, Phil building up to say whatever it was he was going to say. After about the fourth block he said, “What the fuck were you doing back there? You think this is a fucking game?”

  I said, “I was helping Ren. He was trying to get home.”

  Phil softened a little. “Yeah, well,” he said, “do me a favor. Don’t ever help me, okay?”

  The city passed by with children at play in the gathering dusk, shopkeepers standing in their doorways, and men watching women watching men. Life hadn’t slowed down, even a little. Ren was dead, and soon the black smoke that flattened out over the sunset would be gone, too, blown away by the night wind, and the spinning of the globe, and tomorrow we would be a full day closer to a time wh
en no one remembered Ren, and no one mourned his passing.

  “How did you know we were there?”

  Phil was thinking about something else, and he ignored me. “We need to see a friend of mine,” he said.

  The cab dropped us in front of the corner wine store just as the lights came on, illuminating the white-tiled walls and stuffed, dusty fish. The Asian man stood behind the counter, drying his hands on a wine-stained apron.

  Phil said, “This is the Chinaman’s Drugstore.”

  “This is where Zorro picked me up,” I said. Four days before, but it seemed like a lifetime.

  “You need wine,” Phil said, “this is the place. I’ll even teach you some Spanish. ‘Abrio y frio.’ That’s ‘open’ and ‘cold.’ And you ever need me and don’t know where I am, you come here and ask for Choppo.”

  “Who’s Choppo?”

  “He’s coming to pick us up, then I want you to take the car I borrowed back to La Boca.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Harp.” Phil sighed. “It’s time for you to go home. And I mean the States home.”

  “Not until I know what’s going on here. They can’t do that to Ren and expect me to back off.”

  “They didn’t expect you to back off. They expected you to be in the back seat of that Chevy,” Phil said. “I’m the one who wants you to back off.”

  “I’m not leaving until I know what’s going on.”

  Phil ran his open hand over his face. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the hot afternoon air. “You ever been to Disneyland?”

  “No. I don’t like amusement parks.”

  “What kind of person doesn’t like Disneyland?” he said. “What are you, a fucking communist?”

  “Okay, so what am I missing?”

  “Besides a sense of humor?”

  I slouched in the corner, arms crossed over my chest. “Fuck you, Phil.”

  “One summer in high school, I went so often I got to fuck Minnie Mouse. True. It was like a perk, like a special ride for special guests.”

  I pictured Minnie with her little red skirt pulled up to her ears.