by Lewis Shiner
Cole opened his eyes. “Where is Val?”
“She, uh, she doesn’t like hospitals,” Linda said.
“She’s pissed,” Luke said. Luke had once told Cole that he didn’t talk much because he had loud music playing in his head all the time. It had explained a lot.
“Luke, shut up,” Linda said.
“She thinks you should have come back to the hotel with us and this would never have happened.”
“She’s going to be more pissed,” Cole said, “when she finds out I can’t play for two months.”
“Fuck,” Linda said. “Really?”
The conversation stumbled on for another couple of minutes before Cole told them he needed to rest. Linda failed to conceal her relief. Once they were gone, he rang the nurses’ station. “I’m in some pain here,” he said. “Can I get another shot?”
*
Cole was discharged Monday afternoon, but not before he had the pleasure of seeing Grant, Bonham, Ricardo, and the blond, who was apparently a gangster and sometime movie actor named John Bindon, on the local noon news as they were marched in handcuffs out of the Hilton and placed under arrest. Released immediately on bond, of course. Nonetheless the best moment Cole had had in a while.
Regina at Graham’s office had rescheduled his flight for Tuesday morning and gotten him a room at the Hilton. Eating in the deserted hotel restaurant, he heard a waiter say that Zeppelin had done $10,000 worth of damage to the hotel, the drummer alone having thrown five tv sets and a desk out of the shattered windows, narrowly missing spectators below.
The hospital had sent him home with Percodan and Cole managed to restrain himself from washing them down with alcohol. He got in to Austin late Tuesday night and on Wednesday afternoon Valentina dropped by.
“Did you hear about Plant?” she said by way of greeting. Cole shook his head. “His son died, over in England. He got a phone call in New Orleans from his wife last night. Some kind of viral infection. Bam, just like that. They cancelled the rest of the US tour and they’re all flying back to England. People are saying it’s karma for what happened in Oakland.”
“Karma,” Cole said. Words failed him. Nobody deserved to lose their son.
Valentina declined to sit down. “I wanted to tell you face to face that we’re going to use a substitute guitar player until you can come back. With the album just out, the Oakland publicity, we need to do what we can to keep some momentum going. Whenever you’re ready, you can have your job back and she’ll step down.”
“She?” Cole said. “You already know who it’s going to be?”
“Rest up, get well soon.”
“At least Linda brought me flowers,” Cole said.
“We’ll talk,” Valentina said, and then she was gone.
*
The alarm went off at 7:30, Alex’s usual Monday wake-up time. He’d scheduled the day in detail, with time allotted for a breakfast that he had no appetite for and a futile five minutes of sitting on the toilet. The idea was not to give yourself a lot of leeway to change your mind, or even to think at all.
Magdalena arrived before 9, as usual, and Alex confirmed that she was still willing to spend the night. Callie was in Marfa again, and Alex had written out a message in English for Magdalena to read to her if she happened to call.
He wore a new suit and an open collared white dress shirt. He drove to Love Field and left his car in long-term parking, then caught a shuttle to Avis, where he picked up a late model Buick Regal, dark gold, with a Landau roof, one step down from a Cadillac. It had an 8-track player, and one of Alex’s two briefcases was full of tapes—Dylan, the Dead, the Stones, the Doors, Stevie Wonder, Lou Reed, the Allman Brothers, and of course Led Zeppelin. The other held $5000 in twenties, the fruit of five separate trips to his bank over the space of two months, using the excuse that he was paying cash for work on his house.
I-40 ran uninterrupted to the border now—you just pointed the car south and tried not to think too much. You didn’t want to think, for instance, about driving west instead and maybe catching Callie in flagrante. Or stopping in Austin to see Cole, who would be back from San Francisco by now, full of stories of the aforementioned Zeppelin and their major flagrante.
South of Waxahachie he put the hammer down, paying no more attention to the 55 m.p.h. signs than anyone else. Eventually he fell in behind an 18-wheeler that passed him doing 80, assuming the driver had a radar detector and a cb. Sure enough, he slowed all the way to the double-nickels for the notorious speed trap in Selma, north of San Antonio, and Alex stopped for gas when the truck did, buying jerky and doughnuts and candy bars for lunch.
Moving at that kind of speed was an end in itself, celebrated in a thousand highway songs—a remedy for the blues, a surefire way to leave his worries behind. He sang along to the tapes and let the music transport him to San Francisco, to Mexico as a kid, to the Castle, to playing with The Chevelles.
At the Mexican border, I-35 became Carretera Federal 85, the old Pan-American Highway that passed through Monterrey, home of the Cerveceria Cuautémoc, on its way to Mexico City. When Alex was little, before Jimmy was born, the family had driven from Dallas to Monterrey a couple of times a year, at Christmas and at the start of summer vacation, so that his father could maintain his personal contacts at the brewery. The trips meant new comics to read in the car, getting to speak Spanish, which had seemed transgressive at the time, staying in a hotel with pink tile floors and ceiling fans, and eating all kinds of ice cream and sweets on the street.
Alex hit the International Bridge by four in the afternoon. Most of the traffic was headed north, but he still ended up in a long line of cars in the broiling August sun. The guards on the US side waved him through. On the Mexican side, he put a five-dollar bill in his passport and smiled at the soldier in the green uniform.
“What is the purpose of your visit?” the soldier asked in English.
«To see my mother,» Alex answered in Spanish.
«And how long will you be staying?»
«Just tonight.»
The guard neatly extracted the bill. He handed back the passport and saluted. «Enjoy your stay.»
Álvaro’s instructions took him past the Mercado Maclovio Herrera, a two-story tourist trap full of piñatas and embroidered dresses, where he and Susan had always made his parents stop. He remembered the rich, warm smell of the cowhide belts and holsters, the gleam of the endless varnished straw cowboy hats, the sweet odor of roasting meat and corn, the rainbow-colored tissue paper that wrapped the caramelized goat’s milk candy in its wooden containers the size of a cat food can that you would spoon out with broken pieces of the lid.
A year into deflation, business had still not recovered. Tourists swarmed around the building, taking advantage of the hunger for US dollars. The faces of the locals were pinched and tired, the streets unswept, the windows of neighboring buildings boarded up.
Past the Mercado, Alex zigzagged through deteriorating neighborhoods until he arrived at a different sort of trap, a cantina with bat-wing doors and a scratchy waltz-time corrida wailing out into the street from the jukebox. A burro was tied to a hitching post outside, and an old man with a Polaroid camera stood next to a sign offering photos for a dollar.
Alex found a place to park and locked the car. The loss/damage waiver that had doubled the rental price was looking more and more like a smart investment. He put the briefcase with the tapes in the trunk and carried the other one in his left hand. For the first time he considered the possibility of a double-cross. He and Álvaro hadn’t been close since they were kids. Would Alex’s life be worth five thousand dollars cash? They wouldn’t even have to kill him. If they took the money and car at gunpoint, what could he do?
Standing in a dark suit under the murderous sun was not the place to have second thoughts. He’d come too far, and if he couldn’t trust Álvaro, he wasn’t sure he cared what happened to him.
Inside the bar Alex found a thousand square feet of peeling green linoleum
, a row of unused and splintery wooden booths, and a long, mostly deserted bar. A tourist in Bermuda shorts took photos of the quaint inhabitants with a camera that he would be lucky to get out of the neighborhood with, while his blonde wife and daughter edged toward the door, saying, “C’mon, Phil, we need to get back to the car.”
At the bar, Alex said, “I’m looking for Álvaro. He’s expecting me.”
The bartender never made eye contact. “Upstairs,” he said.
As Alex’s eyes adjusted, he made out the staircase in the corner farthest from the bat wings and next to the bleating juke box. As he climbed, the blonde woman said, “Phil, please.”
The stairs led to a long, dim hallway. Alex felt his shirt wilt and dampen in the heat. The doors on his left were numbered, and on the right was an arch with a bead curtain. Alex pushed through it into a lounge. At a table along one wall, a woman in a tank top and flannel shorts and nothing else bent over a mirror and snorted coke through a short piece of red-and-white-striped plastic straw. In one of the mismatched armchairs, a guy with a long, black pony tail, ragged facial hair, and missing teeth watched with hooded eyes while a woman in hot pants and a tube top stroked his cock through his jeans. On the other side of the room, a heavyset man with a scar from eye to ear, wearing a blue Policía Federal shirt over blue jeans, smiled and talked intently to a woman in a filmy nightgown who was reading El Libro Sentimental, a digest-sized romance comic. Three barely teenaged boys in dirty white T-shirts sat on the floor in the corner, sorting pills on a sheet of newspaper and putting them into plastic sandwich bags. Old fashioned paper shades blocked the windows. The room smelled of sour perfume, cigarette and marijuana smoke, sweat, and, faintly, of ether.
Álvaro sat on a couch next to another man, both of them in jeans and T-shirts, both holding acoustic guitars, Álvaro trying to teach the other man to play “Malagueña.” When Alex walked in, Álvaro’s face lit up. «Fuck you, Ramón, here’s a guy who knows how to play the guitar.» He tossed the guitar on the couch and jumped up to crush Alex in an abrazo.
«Órale, Chuy,» Álvaro said to one of the boys. «Take the señor’s car to the garage.» To Alex he said, «Give him your keys.»
Alex tried not to show his reluctance. «It’s the gold Buick across the street.»
Álvaro laughed. «Don’t worry, he’s been driving since before he could see over the wheel.»
Alex held out the keys and the kid grabbed them and sprinted downstairs, as if Alex might change his mind. And maybe he would have, if he’d had a minute to think, but he’d come this far on autopilot and now it was too late.
«Ramón,» Álvaro said, «give mi primo Alejo the guitar and watch how it’s done.»
Ramón was maybe 20, with bloodshot eyes from yerba and bad teeth from growing up poor and a catlike grace that told Alex he could be dangerous in a fight. He handed over the guitar with deference, and the sight of it unlocked something in Alex’s heart. Álvaro projected the same respect, a respect he’d never shown before, and it was not because of who his father was, it was for the courage Alex had shown in coming there, and for the power that the money in the briefcase, Alex’s own money, brought with it.
«I haven’t played in years,» Alex said, though since Callie had been going to Marfa, he had pulled out his acoustic and fooled with it a few times. “Malagueña” came back as soon as he started to play. It had always been one of Cole’s favorites, a natural for getting girls’ knees in the air. Alex took the lead vocal and Álvaro fell naturally into the high harmony. The girl who’d been sniffing coke sat back in her chair and tears ran down her cheeks. Ramón, sitting with his head slightly bowed, looked like he might cry too.
After that they played “Guantanamera” and everybody sang along, then Álvaro passed around a fat joint. Alex knew he shouldn’t have any, but he was afraid to refuse. Besides, he thought, it might help his jangling nerves.
When it was gone, Álvaro said, «You want to get something to eat?»
«There’s, uh, the matter of the briefcase.»
«Ah yes, el maletín. Come with me.»
At the end of the hall was a small office with a fluorescent desk lamp and an adding machine and a three-foot high freestanding safe. Álvaro closed the office door, ran the combination, and opened it up while Alex popped the latches on his briefcase. He’d put a change of shirt, underwear, and socks and a shaving kit on top of the stacks of bills, and now he wondered if they made him look like a rube. He passed the bundles of twenties to Álvaro, who stacked them neatly in the safe.
«You don’t want to count it?» Alex asked.
«There’s an accountant guy who’ll count it on Monday. I trust you. I’m too hungry to spend an hour counting all this shit.»
After his saying that, Alex was too embarrassed to ask for a receipt. It was ridiculous how little he knew about what he was doing, what the standards of behavior were. So far it had been as fast and loose as the parties the teenaged Álvaro used to hold when his parents were out of town.
When all the money was in the safe, Álvaro locked it and said, «Let’s eat!»
They climbed into Álvaro’s new black gmc, Jimmy, Alex and Ramón and Álvaro in the front, the guy in the pony tail and another of the kids sitting in the covered bed by the tailgate. Álvaro drove with careless speed while Alex watched his own tight-lipped smile in the rear-view mirror. Eventually Álvaro pulled up to the curb in a no-parking zone and left the kid to watch the truck.
The restaurant was large and comparatively expensive, by Nuevo Laredo standards. Álvaro ignored the long line of mostly gringos outside the door. A maître d’ in a tux took them to a table on a balcony overlooking a stage where a ten-piece mariachi band, in glittering red and gold trajes de charro, played “Allá en el Rancho Grande.” Except for Alex, their group was the worst-dressed in the room. Álvaro was completely unselfconscious. The maître d’ treated them with a mixture of affection and respect, and Alex understood that once again Álvaro was making a statement about his status.
At Álvaro’s urging Alex had the chile relleno, and it was in fact good enough to make him forget his fear for a few minutes—the huge poblano pepper just hot enough to tingle his tongue, the cheese rich and the salsa tart. The mariachis left the stage, playing “Guadalajara,” and wound their way through the tables and up the stairs, ending up, not surprisingly, at Álvaro’s table. Money subtly changed hands and Álvaro asked what Alex wanted to hear.
«Do you know ‘Quién será’?» Alex asked the lead violinist.
«¿Como no?» He smiled as if no one could have chosen a more perfect song. It was an old Pablo Beltrán cha-cha-cha that Dean Martin had covered as “Sway.” The Spanish lyrics were darker, full of longing. Who will be the one who loves me, I want the passion and heat that will make me feel again.
Once the song began, he saw that it was in danger of knocking him on his ass. Because he was in Mexico, and drinking, and in the company of men, however, sorrow was permitted. Everyone cheered when he wiped at his eyes.
It was 10:00 by the time they got back to the room above the bar. Alex had allowed himself two beers with dinner, but he was instantly sober when he saw the boy Chuy, jingling Alex’s keys.
«You should stay the night,» Álvaro said. «We can play some poker. Remember when you taught me to play? And we can sing and smoke some yerba. Then one of these ladies can help you to bed.»
When Alex looked in the women’s eyes, he saw only a stoic determination to please. «Better to get it over with,» he said. «Then I won’t have to spend the night being nervous.»
«As you wish,» Álvaro said. «But I swear to you there is nothing to be afraid of.»
«We’ll see,» Alex said. He held out his hand to Chuy and the boy tossed the keys in a high arc. Alex snatched them out of the air and thought, all I have to do is be the man they believe me to be.
In the street, he unlocked the trunk to trade the briefcase that had held the money for the one with his tapes. It was okay to open the
trunk at the border, Álvaro had said. Everything was well hidden, and Alex was better off not knowing where it was. So he was somewhat puzzled to see a couple of woven plastic shopping bags. He couldn’t make himself look inside.
He slammed the trunk and got in and started the car. His mouth was dry. He’d pocketed a couple of peppermints at the restaurant, and he put one in his mouth and pulled away from the curb. He rolled down the power windows and headed for the bridge.
In line at the river, the air no longer felt cool. He started to sweat. He rolled the windows up and turned the air conditioner on full blast. His hands went cold and the stream of air dried his face while the sweat continued to flow under his arms, soaking his shirt. You’re going to give yourself away, he thought.
He lowered the a/c as his turn finally came. He rolled his window down and held out his passport with another five enclosed. The guard was the same one from that afternoon. «How was your mother, señor?»
Alex tried to summon the melancholy that “Quién será” had brought him. «Sadly, she is becoming someone else. Someone who barely knows me.»
The guard nodded. «It happens. The years can be very hard on us.»
«Also hard on those of us who love her.»
The guard expertly palmed the bill without losing eye contact and handed back the passport. «Claro. Go with God, señor.»
«You, too.»
His pangs of guilt at deceiving the man were easily outweighed by the thrill of it. His confidence surged. The performance he’d just given was no different than playing bass, something he already knew how to do.
The guard on the US side was gringo, with aggressively short hair and some kind of quick draw holster that made the handle of his revolver stick out an angle from his leg. “Evening,” Alex said, holding out the passport, this time without the bribe. “How you doing?”
“Turn the car off and step outside, please, sir.”
His high was instantly gone. This was what you asked for, he thought. You wanted to be scared, and now you’ve got it. And it had worked. He wanted nothing more in the world than to be able to go into his father’s office and sit at a desk and not be afraid. “Sure,” he said.