The Dogs of Mexico

by John J. Asher

  “Hey!” Robert shouted.

  Five minutes later he stopped a second Taxi, the driver watching them, suspicious.

  “Terminal Central Norte,” Ana said, opening the rear door before the driver had a chance to change his mind.

  The driver watched them in the rearview mirror until they were settled, luggage in the footwell, the aluminum case on the seat between them. Then he put the car in gear and pulled away.

  Robert turned to Ana, but the black grit began closing in, clouding his vision. His headache grew, darkness closing in.

  “Ana…” he began, intending to tell her to take the money and run. But the blackness overtook him and he never got to finish.

  44

  Dr. Ayala

  FLICKERS OF LIGHT. A metallic clatter of noise like the crisp shuffling of a new deck of cards. His was the realm of the sensory only. Light. Sound. Then, a smidgen of consciousness and he began to understand that he was in a room, an all-white room—a woman, her back to him, opening the blinds—the metallic shuffling sound, the bright outside light pouring in like molten metal.

  He closed his eyes. Lay still. Tried to think.

  He and Ana had been escaping…the backseat of a taxi…he had thought he was dying. But recalling the room frozen in his visual memory—the little crank-up utility table by the bed, and something like a clipboard at the foot—he felt sure it was a hospital room.

  He heard the nurse coming, her hospital shoes on the tile floor. She took his hand and he realized she was removing an oxygen sensor from his right index finger.

  When he heard her retreating, he opened his eyes again. The brightness was jarring. An IV was attached to his left arm. A blood-pressure machine on a nearby stand.

  The nurse turned and came back. Seeing he was watching her, she smiled brightly. “Ah! Señor! Español?”

  He tried to shake his head, but it felt riveted in place. “Lo siento. No Español,” he managed in a whispery voice.

  “Is okay. I speak English”—she pinched her thumb and forefinger together—“Un poquito. A little bit.”

  “Uh…can you tell me what happened? What I’m doing here?”

  “You are bring here by a very worry woman. She think you are dead.”

  So. Ana had dropped him off. Left him for dead. An incomprehensible bleakness settled through him.

  “How long have I been here?”

  The woman took his hand in hers. “This morning. She have bring you to the best hospital in all of México, the Centro Medico. They do a CT on your head. You have a wound in your…” She paused, frowned, pointed to her forehead “…up here, a front lobe,” she finished.

  “A what?”

  “Your médico, he will tell you of these things.”

  “I like you,” he said, having no idea he was going to say such a thing until he heard himself having already said it. So, they had him souped up on drugs.

  The nurse laughed and let go his hand. “Sí. It is obvious. You are recover nicely.” She picked up the clipboard, made a note, then hung it on the foot of the bed. “I check you later. Good-bye now.”

  She had hardly left the room when a doctor came in followed by another nurse.

  The doctor wore a crisp white lab coat over a white shirt and tie. He smiled as he neared the bed. The nurse following him was younger than the other one, all business, watching him over the half-lenses of her glasses, a black cord dangling from the frames looped around her neck.

  “Good morning. Nice to see you awake and looking so well. I’m Doctor Ayala.”

  “Thank you. I’m Robert Bohnert.” He wondered if that was who he was today, if that was who Ana had signed him in as.

  “Are you the guy who fixed me up? I appreciate it.”

  The doctor smiled. “I had very good help.” He took a brief look at the chart on the foot of the bed, then removed a small light from his jacket pocket. “Let’s have a look in your eyes.”

  Robert tried to turn his head to accommodate, but couldn’t. He saw that he was in some kind of brace.

  “Whoa,” he said. “I’m all wired up here.” He realized too that he had on a johnny gown, open in back, the strings pulled around and tied in front.

  “Yes,” the doctor replied absently, his attention focused, looking into each of Robert’s eyes—leaving a big bright spot that changed to black, then changed again to lavender when he took the light away. “Very good,” said the doctor. “Yes, we don’t want you too active until we see how you’re healing.”

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “Very interesting,” said Dr. Ayala. “You have a fresh wound on your forehead, and bruises. But then, there is a much older wound directly beneath, a scar which seems to have been partly removed, and a much more serious wound to your skull directly below, on your frontal lobe. A curious thing.”

  “That goes back a few years,” Robert said. He told Dr. Ayala about getting hit in the head with a marble-based desk lamp. “I was in the hospital a few days, my head swollen, but then they let me go.” He didn’t mention that it was the police who clobbered him. Or that he had been committed to the state hospital for observation. Or that he had escaped and blown up his house.

  “And more recently?” Dr. Ayala asked. “The fresh wounds?”

  “My wife and I, we were robbed in Oaxaca. Both of us, beaten,” he lied. “Then we were over there in the historic district when all that trouble broke out on the zócalo. I got hit with a stray bullet. My old scar was hanging down and I snipped it off with scissors.”

  Dr. Ayala gave him a long, penetrating look. Robert was unsure whether he was being observed with suspicious disbelief, or wonder. “Well,” Dr. Ayala said, “you must have a very bad impression of our México. That said, you are one lucky man.”

  “I am?”

  “I don’t know who your previous surgeons were, but you may want to rethink before considering them again. You had a small horizontal V indent in your skull, the point pressing on your frontal cortex. There was a clot. It’s a miracle that it hadn’t ruptured.”

  “So…you operated? You fixed it?”

  “We will keep you under observation a few days. It looks good at the moment, and if all goes well we’ll dismiss you. However, you must come back in a month for a follow-up, another CT. And, depending, perhaps again in a few months after that.”

  “Do you think I’ve suffered brain damage?”

  “If you hadn’t any symptoms before, no. We relieved the pressure on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Again you are lucky, for this area of the brain sometimes affects our judgment, our sense of right and wrong. It isn’t uncommon for people with damage to this area to undergo a personality change, some more than others, depending.”

  Robert told him about the shadowy grit and the headaches.

  Dr. Ayala nodded, kind, sympathetic. “Well, again, there was no rupture, and I should think that with the pressure relieved, you would no longer experience that.”

  Robert let that soak for a moment, contemplating the significance of this new information. Then, abruptly, he cut his eyes back to the good doctor. “Dr. Ayala,” he said, “you’re my new best friend.”

  For the first time the young nurse in attendance with Dr. Ayala smiled a little.

  They brought breakfast. Coffee, a slurry of oatmeal, and a bowl of orange Jell-O. Afterward a big male attendant who looked like a sumo wrestler set him in a wheelchair and helped him to the bathroom, dragging his IV on its wheeled stand. When he returned to his room, another nurse came, took his vital signs and inquired whether he was in pain. He wasn’t.

  Maybe he should have questioned Dr. Ayala further about Ana. If she had signed him in as his wife, what name had she used? Adding to the mystery was the fact that he was in a private room. Would they want money before dismissing him? How would he explain that he hadn’t a dime to his name? How would he explain his wife deserting him? He had no money. No friends. Nowhere to go. He considered the Am
erican Consulate. But how would he explain his presence in Mexico?

  After all that had happened to him—the work he had done in Cairo, the death of his son, his wife skipping out—he had come to think of himself as a hard case, inured to the little emotional vagaries that derailed most people. Nevertheless, his throat felt tight, hard to breathe as he imagined Ana, comfortable in a first-class bus, the aluminum case tucked under her seat, rolling north through the night. Feeling sorry for himself.

  He wondered just how dead she had thought he was. Really dead, or just dead enough she could convince herself and skip out without a nagging conscious. He had known better, had preached the gospel of double-cross and abandonment to himself from the get-go. Still, she had had a rough time. If there was any solace, it was in visualizing her at peace somewhere in the northern latitudes. Even so…

  He dozed. Nurses entered, woke him, took his vitals.

  A late afternoon rectangle of slatted sunlight hit through the blinds and was creeping up the wall opposite the window when Dr. Ayala returned with two interns. He flipped on the overhead and took a look at Robert’s chart. He looked in his eyes with the light again. “Very good,” he said, patting Robert on the shoulder. “Hopefully in the morning we’ll remove the brace and release you in a couple of days.”

  Dr. Ayala cut the light off on his way out.

  SOMEONE TOUCHED HIS face, redirecting him from a purgatory of dreams back into the reality of the hospital room, tinted faintly now by the last amber light of the evening and the LEDs on the medical equipment.

  He stared, unable for a moment to comprehend what he was seeing.

  Ana bent over him, one arm threaded through the looped handles of a shopping bag. “I brought pajamas,” she whispered, her fingertips gently touching his lips.

  45

  Guanajuato

  ROBERT SAT ACROSS from Ana. They sipped midmorning bloody marys at an outdoor café on the Jardín Unión in Guanajuato.

  “Coming here was a good idea,” he said.

  Ana gazed down the street where several students from the university had gathered, lounging about with their backpacks. Half a dozen were tuning musical instruments—violins, trumpets, guitars—a pleasant discord in the otherwise sunny quiet.

  “It is a lovely town, isn’t it,” she said.

  “How did you know about this place?”

  “I was here a time or two.” She watched him, a forlorn smile. Light reflected off the table and off her persimmon-colored shirt, filling her green eyes with a bronze-like translucence. “It’s said to be the most romantic town in Mexico,” she added.

  “Well, between the town and the company I’m sold.”

  Located in a narrow valley in central Mexico, Guanajuato was known for its streets—or lack thereof—more a complex maze of narrow alleyways between row upon row of brightly colored houses stair-stepping up mountainsides so steep the foundations of many houses were level with the roofs of their neighbors. The only entrance into the town funneled down into a steep crevice between the mountains and into a tunnel for some distance before surfacing again into daylight in a kind of mountain cul-de-sac. The tunnel had once been a river, or maybe it was a mine, and now served as an underground passageway and a municipal parking facility.

  Robert was determined to ignore the feeling of claustrophobia the mountains rising up on either side occasionally induced, choosing instead to think of it as a form of womblike security.

  They had taken a comfortable little house not far from the town’s historic district. The district itself was known for its churches, municipal buildings, its colonial-era mansions of pink and green sandstone in the Baroque style. Due to the town’s university with almost thirty-five thousand students—not to mention tourists and ex-pats from the US and Canada—it was larger than it first appeared.

  They each jumped at a sudden pop pop pop sounding from a distance—a few of the students letting off firecrackers, laughing, looking guiltily about. Robert and Ana glanced at each other. A moment of grave silence as they resettled themselves.

  “Lobsters,” Ana said after a time, her voice still a little shaky. “I’m holding you to that trip to Maine.”

  He studied her, her pale face, her trembling hands. “You okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “That may be a while,” he said. “Maine, that is. I still have to go back for that scan.”

  “There’s no hurry,” she said. “Actually, we could live right here forever.”

  It was true. They could. He had been greatly relieved and not a little surprised when he discovered that Ana’s absence from the hospital was due to time spent depositing the money in Banomex, Mexico’s second largest bank, and then investing a large chunk of it by way of Edward Jones. Well, she’d said, you can’t just go camping out in a hospital with eight hundred thousand dollars in your overnight bag.

  “Your scar has healed nicely,” she said, calmer now, a little light in her eyes. “You’re looking about half decent.”

  He grinned. “Are you trying to seduce me again with your sweet talk?”

  She brought her chair around the little table and set it alongside his, resting her forearm against his, gazing toward the little gathering of students a block away.

  After a moment she took his hand in hers, studying him with probing intensity. “Are you still having dreams?”

  Mickey. Mickey Sierra. Some nights she would come and sit with him and drink his brandy, her discolored finger nub extended, her blackened silent-movie-era eyes watching him. Once she took her panties off and pulled them down over her head and when she looked with each eye out the leg openings they were black and gelatinous, grit clogged. He tried to apologize.

  “No,” he said to Ana. “You?”

  She folded her arms under her breasts and looked again into the distance. “Valdez. Just once. I asked him what it was like to be dead. I wasn’t thinking of him, what it was like for him to be dead, or Helmut or Geraldo or Fowler, but my brother.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said it wasn’t like anything.” Ana looked at him in earnest. She unfolded her arms and laced the fingers of her hands together on the tabletop. “Maybe if we dream about it enough, it’ll all go away.”

  He knew that wasn’t true. They might learn to live with it, but it would be there, always, in the shadowed periphery of their minds.

  “This is going to take some time,” he said.

  “Time? Yes…a little time.”

  “And courage.”

  She watched him, quizzical.

  “The thing itself. As long as we don’t lose that we’ll be okay.”

  She looked aside in thought.

  He took her hands in his, lifted them and touched each to his lips, one after the other.

  “Way to go man.”

  Robert glanced up to see a young couple approaching, smiling. The girl, an Asian, carried a guitar strapped across her back. The boy, wearing an Ohio Buckeyes sweatshirt, raised one hand. Robert lifted his own hand with easy goodwill and high-fived the kid in passing.

  Ana turned, smiling, eyes bright with promise, watching the couple stroll away. She turned back to Robert and lifted one hand. “Way to go man,” she whispered in imitation.

  He high-fived her, then took her hand in his again.

  She watched him from under lowered brows, a touch of mischief. “You want to know what I think?”

  “You’re going to tell me, regardless, right?”

  “I think we should go back to our room and see what develops.”

  He smiled a little. “Great minds think alike.”

  He stood, took several bills from his wallet, and placed them on the table. Ana stood in turn and picked up her strapped purse. She caught her hand in the crook of his elbow.

  Yes. This is a good place, he thought, walking with her across the Jardín Unión, its square-cut stone paving radiating warmth in the mild sunshine. A good place.

  THEIR WAITER, an old man stooped wi
th arthritis, stood in the shade alongside the restaurant’s doorway, a white cloth draped over his forearm. With a forlorn smile tinged with bitterness, he watched the gringo couple walking away. Ah, how good to be so happy, so carefree. These soft Yanquis, they know nothing of life’s difficulties, its dangers, its hardships. Well, he mused, these two, they are good tippers. I wish them great happiness for tomorrow and forever after.

  —o—

  For other books by this author:

  http://www.amazon.com/John-J-Asher/e/B008FBZKL0

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Tiffany Yates Martin, Kelly Harrell, and Amber Novak, three excellent writers, razor-sharp critiquers, and beloved friends. Without your red pens and editorial input over many a good meal and a few glasses of wine, this novel wouldn’t exist. To each of you, I am eternally grateful.

  Thanks also to Deanna Roy of Casey Shay Press, and Lara Reznik of Enchanted Indie Press for your continued support and friendship, for your priceless suggestions and technical expertise.

  —o—