It occurred to him that while he held her blameless for her accident, he couldn’t forgive his own.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you,” she said.
“No, I’m glad you did. This is a stupid thing to say, considering, but I’ll try to be more circumspect with the guns.”
She exhaled a little half-chocked laugh. “Yes, that’s pretty funny, considering.”
Up ahead, an old woman in a black mantilla rose up alongside the road, a bamboo birdcage at her side. She watched with gleaming eyes, a maniacal grin, lifting her arms over her head, a wild fluttering bird clutched by its feet in each gnarled hand as they dragged by.
Robert shook his head. “This is a hell of a country.”
Ana looked at him, quizzical.
“That old woman,” he said. “Like death itself.”
“Old woman?”
He glanced back through the empty rear window. Nothing but the road. Rocks and brush.
27
Pickup Truck
ANA WATCHED ROBERT covertly, wondering why she had felt the need to tell him about the accidental death of her brother, wondering further if he might be marginally nuts. Back at the eatery she had seen in his face that he intended to kill the men. At the time she was glad he hadn’t. Now she wished he had. That’s what she told herself. At least then she would only have Robert and Helmut to worry about.
She questioned her own judgment, telling herself that if she had only used logic rather than emotion, she could be halfway to Oaxaca with the money by now, free and clear. Instead, here she was in a shot-up car, killers after her, her very life in the hands of a man she had every reason to fear and mistrust. Perhaps it was she who was marginally nuts.
She sighed, knowing she had gone back as much for herself as for him: the burden of another’s death, as she well knew, was too much to bear. Unlike Robert, her brother had been an innocent, but neither deserved to have their lives cut short because of her.
Ana struggled with her conscience on another level, too—trying to come to grips with the fact that she had actually helped bury a mutilated girl in a jungle wilderness. Everything was so over the top, so out of the ordinary, it was difficult to assign a median of normalcy to anything at all.
She jumped alert. “Robert!” she shouted, “a truck’s coming up behind!” She slipped down low in the seat, hand trembling, locked on the repellant handgun.
Robert brought the car to a quick stop on a narrow strip of shoulder. “Get out!” he shouted. He pulled the emergency brake on, left the engine idling, grabbed the .45 and the Beretta and hurried around to her side of the car. She got out and knelt alongside, heart knocking. “Keep down,” he whispered. Sunlight reflected off the windshield so it was impossible to see inside the truck, a box van, until it was almost alongside.
A Mexican laborer in a straw hat sat in the passenger seat, one arm up in the open window. He stared for an instant at the pistols trained on him, low over the Nissan’s hood, then the man jerked back from sight. The truck went past, accelerated on around a curve and disappeared. The men probably thought they were cartel—all the bullet holes, the glass shot out.
Robert hurried back to the driver side.
She thumbed the .380’s safety back on, jumped in and pulled the door shut, relief so sudden and intense her eyes filled with tears.
They descended into a shallow valley. The footwells were oven-hot through the firewall. Sweat ran down her temples and trickled down the crease at her spine. She moistened two washcloths with bottled water, handed one to Robert and took one for herself. He wiped his face, arms, hands. She lifted her hair in back and damp-patted her neck.
She spotted two men with machetes some distance ahead, slashing at a patch of sugarcane in a small field. They were loading armfuls onto the bed of an old pickup. She sat forward as Robert slowed and wrestled the Nissan off the pavement into the field stubble, dust billowing up behind.
The men watched as the car bucked to a stop and died. Steam whistled from under the hood, dust slow-settling behind.
Robert got out. “Buenas tardes, señors. Inglés?”
The two men, one middle-aged, the other older, drew near one another, eyeing him with suspicion. Sunlight glinted on the machetes in their weathered hands.
Robert turned back to her through the window. “Ask how much they want for that pickup.”
She got out, then asked in Spanish about the pickup. It was ancient, hand-painted green and magenta, a drowsy-looking burro tied to the front bumper. The men squinted at the pickup under its load of cane, shaded their eyes at the Nissan. Steam whistled from under the hood like a teakettle, little ticking noises as the metal cooled. The younger man mumbled in Spanish.
“Indios,” she said. “But he speaks a little Spanish.”
“We’re in a hurry here. How much?”
She studied Robert a moment, then translated to the men. They watched Robert in turn, cautious. “He says he needs the truck for the fields. Not for sale.”
“Bullshit. We’re taking that truck. Tell him we’ll give him five hundred bucks, US.”
When she translated, the men’s expressions betrayed their excitement. Then the younger man sobered.
“He says the truck is needed for the fields, for his family, but because he is a poor man and needs money to care for his ailing mother, he will sell the truck for six hundred dollars. However, he will lose face with his poor sick wife and his many hungry children, not only for selling the truck, but for making such a bad bargain.”
“Yeah, sure. He’ll be the biggest hero in town when word gets around how he screwed the gringos.” Robert took the folded bills from his pocket and counted seven hundred dollars into the younger man’s hands. “Here’s seven. And ask if he has a title.”
Both men smiled, unable to contain their excitement. “He says he will make his mark on a paper.”
Robert held up a few more bills. “Tell him if he can get the cane off that truck in five minutes, here’s two hundred more. Tell him to cover that car up with cane so nobody can see it, and we’ll make it three for an even thousand. But he’s gotta make it quick.”
Smiling broadly, the men began throwing cane off the pickup with great enthusiasm.
Robert took the tire, then his and Ana’s things out of the Nissan and placed them on the ground. She was startled when he pulled the rear seat out and turned it upside down in the cane stubble. He pried what looked like a military attaché case from a space that had been cut out of the webbing and springs. He inspected it, obviously checking to see if it had been hit in the gunfire. Ignoring her, he set the case to one side, and put the seat back in place.
Well, this was a new twist. But there was no point in asking. He had made that clear. She said nothing, but took the map and the travel guide from the glovebox. Robert struck a match to the Avis contract, let it burn and then ground the ashes into the dirt with his foot.
Within five minutes the men had emptied the pickup but for loose fodder and a five-gallon can, its spout stoppered with a rag wrapped around a stick.
“What’s that?” Robert asked. “Gas?”
“Oil,” she said, translating. “The truck uses a little oil.” She looked on, alternately watching Robert and watching back up the road as he popped the hood and found the dipstick, a small black dab on the end. “He says you can have the oil.”
“Tell them to cover that car up for one week. Then they can break it down and sell the parts.”
The men went to work covering the car as Robert pulled the grease-caked oil cap off the valve cover and poured from the can. The oil looked heavy and iridescent. He got in behind the wheel.
“Okay. There’s a hole here where the ignition should be.”
Ana translated. “He says you only have to twist the wires together.”
She looked on as he fished two wires from underneath the dash, twisted them together and pushed the starter button alongside. The engine coughed over a few times, then caught and bucked to life. A wave of
blue smoke rolled out from underneath before the truck settled down. Robert wiped his hands on a rag taken from the floorboard, then went back and took the spare tire and set it in the bed of the pickup.
The younger man paused in the act of covering the Nissan. “He says that tire won’t fit the truck.”
“Tell him it doesn’t matter. I’m only taking it to save face with my poor sick wife and all my hungry children.”
In spite of having just buried another human being and within minutes of almost being killed herself, she found she was almost smiling. She translated and the men smiled as well, the older man tilting his head, wagging one finger back and forth, indicating that he appreciated the joke.
“Robert put the bolt cutter behind the pickup’s seat. He fit the luggage and he mysterious attaché case into individual garbage bags, stowed them in the bed of the pickup and covered it under a layer of cane. He gave the younger man the extra three hundred dollars while the older man untied the burro from the bumper. There was the customary handshaking. The younger man took a packet wrapped in a cloth and a jug of water from the pickup. Robert opened the door for her, then went around and climbed in behind the wheel.
The cab was high and narrow, the gearshift a metal stem sticking up from the floorboard, a round knob on the end. A threadbare blanket had been folded over the seat where the springs were popping out. The top half of the windshield was covered with some kind of transparent foil to deflect the sun.
“What?” she said, following Robert’s gaze to the shot-up Nissan, already beginning to resemble a hut on the African Savanna as the men covered it.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking about the car-rental agent and her accessories.”
Robert drove the pickup out of the field onto the highway. A plastic saint hailed them from a tiny garland of dried flowers on the dash. On the hood, a chrome-plated angel spread her wings into the wind. Oily blue smoke whipped out over the pavement behind.
“So now what?? she said.
“Let’s hope this wreck makes it to San José Del Pacifico before night.”
“And then?”
“Then you can catch your bus to wherever you want.”
“And you?”
“Tell me,” he said, “why did you come back for me?”
She shrugged. “Beats me.” Then added: “I guess I’m just a sucker for punishment.”
It took a moment. Then he laughed out loud, obviously recalling that he had said those exact words to her over breakfast at the restaurant back in Taxco when he invited her and Helmut to ride with him into Acapulco. “Touché,” he said.
She was glad of the humor. Things did look more hopeful now that they were rid of the car.
“Robert, I have a suggestion.”
“Good. We can use some suggestions about now.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Probably not.”
“Forget the photos. Lets get back to the States. Both of us. Right now.”
“Forget the photos?”
She felt the humor evaporating. “See? I knew you’d act like this. Twenty thousand isn’t worth risking your life for.”
“It isn’t the money.”
She gave him a quizzical look.
“This Valdez guy I’m seeing, he’s supposed to be in intelligence, but I don’t know what to expect from him. I can watch out for myself, but I’d feel better if you went on back and—”
“You’d feel better? How about what I feel?”
“That’s not the point. See, you don’t—”
“Listen, I’ll go back when I’m good and ready. In the meantime, you stop telling me what to do!”
She felt him withdrawing. “I can only tell you what I’m doing,” he said. “I guess what you do is up to you.”
“So. That’s how it is?”
“That’s how it is.”
They rode in silence.
The sun was bright, the high thin air cooler than back on the coast. The narrow pavement knifed around the mountainsides, cutting a thin incision through the shaggy vegetation. Pines and giant ferns rose up along either side among tangles of sumac and ficus. Orchids bloomed from fissures in the cliff facings. Rocks often lay in the road, having broken loose from the mountainsides above. From time to time her stomach clinched, a reaction to the heights, to the endless roller-coaster switchbacks. At one point Robert slowed and inched the pickup around a pile of dirt and rocks that had spilled down the mountain and across the pavement. She turned away from her window, not to see the drop-off just outside, the chasm falling so far below, the treetops looked hazy. When they were safely past, she took a deep breath against the empty feeling in her stomach.
Occasionally they passed roadside stands half hidden in jungle growth—children, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, selling bananas, mangos, birds in bamboo cages. But what she kept seeing was the girl, the hole in her forehead, the deep runnels in her wrists and ankles, the gelatinous eyes clogged with grit.
The pickup groaned, climbing into a ceiling of mist. Droplets collected on the windshield, a damp coolness on her skin. The air smelled wetly of pine and decaying vegetation. Robert turned the headlights on, then the wipers. She was relieved that they worked, though it was still difficult to see the road through the mist.
It began to rain and they rolled the windows up. The windshield tried to fog over, but she kept it wiped with one of the washcloths. Even so, it was difficult to see more than fifteen or twenty feet ahead, the terrain reduced to pale gray through the rain-swept windshield.
Then the rain began in earnest. Robert slowed, straining forward over the wheel. Soon he turned in before an abandoned fruit stand of rotted planks and tin, overgrown with giant ferns and sumac. He pulled the wires lose and the engine died. They sat in silence, rain roaring on the cab.
The silence grew awkward—the close proximity with Robert in the cab, their warm breath and the heat of their bodies fogging the windows.
“It’s my automobile,” Robert said, apropos of nothing, perhaps an attempt to dispel the cocoon-like intimacy closing in on them. “You like my snazzy wheels. That’s why you want to stick around.” A new something in his voice. Something she hadn’t heard before.
She studied him—clear gray eyes, mouth curled a little in the corners, a pinch of soft hair in the V of his shirt.
“What?” he said, turning, looking directly at her.
She looked away, staring at the gray slate of the windshield.
“What?” he said again.
She wiped at the windshield with the cloth, but it was just as gray outside, and immediately fogged over again. She shrugged, affecting an attitude of indifference. “Nothing, really. I was wondering if I really do want to stick around. And if so, why?”
“What’re you saying?” He studied her closely, making her nervous, but not in the usual sense—a discomforting inner flush.
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Yes you are.”
She crossed her arms under her breasts, sat back in her seat, drew a slow deep breath. “Tell me about your family,” she said.
“What about them?”
“Your mom, what’s she like?” She supposed it was a trick question, for it was common knowledge that a man’s attitude toward his significant other was likely to echo his attitude toward his mother. Trick question or not, she couldn’t care less, just passing time.
He began to smile. Against her will, she felt herself flushing. “Not to be nosy,” she said quickly. “Just making conversation.”
“My mom. She’s the best. Salt of the earth. Why do you ask?”
“Simply avoiding your dull silence. How does she feel about you…you know, off down here, doing whatever you do, instead of…”
“Hanging around her and my dad? Mmm. I guess they’d prefer having me close by. Sure.”
She volunteered that her father owned a hardware store just outside Denver, but kept to herself the fact that her mother had withdrawn int
o her own dark place after her brother’s death.
“You’ve been around the block a time or two,” she said, attempting an airy, I-could-care-less attitude, “so what do you find attractive in a woman?”
“A sense of humor,” he said without hesitation. “Before anything else, a sense of humor.”
She glanced at him in surprise.
“Tis better to dwell alone in the corner of a rooftop than in a house with a contentious woman,” he quoted.
“Oh? What’s that from?”
“The Bible. But I forget who said it. Probably somebody with a cranky wife.”
“Do you think anyone is cheerful all the time?”
“No. But there are types. I’ll take a shower-singing kitchen-whistling woman any day.”
“Do you think that’s a woman’s place? In the kitchen?”
“Her place is wherever she wants to be. I couldn’t care less as long as she’s pleasant. Actually, I prefer her in the shower.” He grinned, narrowed his eyes on her. “So. Is this a qualifying questionnaire?”
She ignored the remark. “I don’t think I’ve been very pleasant. Not in a long time.”
“Well, my ex, she was happy for a time. But things happen.”
“Anything in particular?”
He stared at the gray windshield, silent, introspective. Then, finally: “Nope.”
So. He has his secrets too.
“Humor’s good,” he said in the after-silence, “but I’m not always that patient with silliness.”
“Well,” she said airily, “I pity the woman who would even try holding to that thin line.”
She wiped the windows again. Her forearm touched his. The air in the cab changed in some subtle way, the ions reordering themselves. Her eyes felt hot behind the lids, her breathing altered. She realized that whatever was happening had been coming on for some time.
Stop, she told herself, struggling to reset her emotional gyroscope, this goes against everything you’ve promised yourself. But it was useless. Her nipples had grown plump, a warm wetness in her panties.
She touched his hand on the steering wheel, her fingertips lingering in the fine hair along his arm. Wordless, she moved close, her thigh against his. She realized in the last remaining realm of her reasoning mind that their relationship was about to change in some unalterable way. She wasn’t just giving in, but rushing in.
The Dogs of Mexico Page 19