“I guess I need to upgrade my reading material,” he said.
She didn’t appear to catch the sarcasm.
“There’s a real good place to eat in Acuña, way out on the other side. You like Meskin food, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“I like it kinda hot, with pepper sauce and stuff.”
“If you like highly seasoned food, you should try some Indian sometime.”
“Indian?”
“Not like Apache Indian, India Indian.”
“Yeah? Where’d you ever have any a that?”
“An Indian couple live right below me in New York. She cooks up the best food you ever ate.” He felt a sudden longing to be back in his loft. It surprised him to realize that here he was with Darlene Delaney, and he was missing New York City…and Frankie. Especially Frankie.
He experienced a moment of clarity: What the hell was he doing here at all? He’d taken off like a mental case when he found Sherylynne’s letter, propelled on a furious charge of adrenaline that had blasted and re-blasted until by now his brains were scrambled. Now, thinking about it, he was astonished that he’d almost killed Whitehead, that he had hit Sherylynne, that he had tried to kidnap Leah… And now, here he was in Mexico with Darlene Delaney?
Darlene looked at him, pouty. “You don’t like Meskin?”
“Sure, I like it,” he said, sharper than he intended. “Who said I didn’t?”
She puckered her lips in a pout. “Maybe you didn’t really wanna come down here?”
He thought about that. “We’re here, aren’t we?”
She softened a little. “Well, we’re gonna have us a real good time. When I come down here with them railroaders we had the best time I ever had. You’ll see.”
She unwrapped a fresh plug of Bazooka, read the comic, then dropped it in the little trash can on the way out.
His ears rang. His tongue was thick and his mouth tasted like rusty iron.
IT WAS A little after three when he drove them through Del Rio. Up ahead, the bridge stretched out over the shallow river. A sign read: CITIZENS INTERNATIONAL BRIDGE.
“The thing is to park in one of them lots on this side and take a taxi across. You don’t wanna take a good American car over there.”
He turned into a parking lot where big orange signs with black lettering read, PARKING, TAXI, TOURS, CHEAPEST RATES, the rates themselves printed in little tiny letters. A few men in short-sleeved shirts and sandals slouched around old cars with missing chrome and patchworks of paint primer, “Taxi” lettered on the doors.
A pudgy little Mexican with big white teeth and a Purina Feed gimme cap ran to meet them as they pulled into the lot. “Buenos días!” he cried, huffing alongside the car, guiding them into a parking place, although the lot was practically empty. The man paused, giving Harley a second look—his cupped nose, his black eyes. Then, cautiously: “You wish a taxi, no? A little shopping? A tour perhaps? Alfredo Renaldo Lopez! Sí, is me. I know the best deal for turistas in all México!”
Harley followed Darlene into the backseat of Alfredo’s little Volkswagen bug parked among the old Chevys and Fords. The VW’s front passenger seat had been removed for easy access.
Darlene unwrapped a new plug of Bazooka as they raced at the bridge, the little VW rattling like a worn-out sewing machine. They slowed to a stop at the American Customs—back-to-back boxlike buildings that resembled enlarged toll booths. Alfredo flashed his smile. The agent at the window gave them a cursory glance and waved them on through. They crossed over the Rio Grande, half-naked children playing in the shallow pools below. On the Mexican side, Alfredo barely slowed, got an indifferent nod from the agent, and then the street narrowed, funneling them in between two-story stucco buildings painted every possible shade of magenta, yellow, green. A profusion of merchandise spilled out of the doorways onto broken sidewalks. Flowering plants filled window-boxes and pocket balconies.
A few Anglos meandered from shop to shop, men and women in shorts, sneakers, Hawaiian shirts, women in denim wrap-around skirts and pastel blouses. Somber Mexicans loitered here and there, little groups leaning against old cars, squatting against the walls. Other than the tourists, there were few women, one here and there on a balcony or roof, hanging out laundry.
“I know where we want to go,” Darlene said, “it’s this restaurant, but I don’t know the name of it. I know you go on down this street here for a ways. Then you take a left out through some slums. It must be…what, three or four miles maybe?”
Alfredo brightened. He put the VW in gear. “Sí, is maybe El Toro Negro, no?”
Soon the shops and two-story buildings played out to shacks of wood and tin. Cook fires smoked behind makeshift walls. Thin dogs slunk about. Pigs rooted in open sewers.
Darlene wrinkled her nose. “Ain’t this just awful? I don’t know why anybody’d wanna live like this.”
Harley rode in silence, as if observing himself from a distance—he and Darlene and this excitable little Mexican—way off down here in nowhere-Mexico. It was hard to entertain simultaneously the image of upscale Fifth Avenue and the poverty slipping past on either side of the clattering little VW.
The restaurant was at the edge of town, not quite in the country, but away from the slum area. A waiter led them to a table. The place looked clean. There were maybe a dozen customers, mostly Anglos. Alfredo wedged himself into a booth near the door and settled down to wait. Harley and Darlene took a table, and after a margaritas, they ordered tortilla soup and chicken mole. Harley studied the restaurant, it’s customers, Darlene, as if he were afloat in some dreamy never-never land—the tequila fueling a somnolent sense of wellbeing.
“Don’t eat the salad,” Darlene said. “It’ll give you the drizzlies.”
Six musicians in big sombreros stood to one side, conchos big as silver dollars down the outseams of their tight, ill-fitted pants, singing: “Va-ya con Dios, my dar-leeng / va-ya con Dios, my love…” Harley ordered two more margaritas, shelled out another buck to the musicians.
Chapter 50
The Joyful Door
THE LIGHT OUTSIDE was blinding. Harley staggered. Darlene giggled and hung onto his arm.
Alfredo seemed to roll around them in circles. “My friends, you wish to see the sights, no?”
“Hell, yes,” Harley said. “We gonna ride around all over town!” It echoed in his head, as if someone else were talking.
“Sí. I know all the best place. I make the best bargain.”
“Whatever you say, Alfie old boy, just tickles the hell outta me.” He realized he was deliriously drunk. He didn’t care.
Darlene couldn’t stop laughing, stumbling against the little VW bug. “Alfie? Harley Jay, that’s the funniest thing you ever said! Alfie. Little Alfie. Ha-a-ha-ha.”
He slapped her on the butt as she climbed into the back seat. She squealed. “Harley Jay! You devil, you!”
“Fine pottery you like, no? Or the hand-blow glass most bee-u-ti-ful, made only for you, sí? The finest artistas in all México before your very eyes, sí?” Alfredo sat behind the wheel, half turned at them, mopping his brow with a wadded bandanna.
“Tequila,” Harley said. “You can’t visit Mexico without picking up a bottle of tequila. Alfie, stop at the first liquor store, will you?”
Darlene peeled the wrapper off a new plug of Bazooka. “Alfie, we wanna go to Boy’s Town. You know where that’s at?”
Alfredo’s expression changed. His gaze shifted from one to the other. “The señorita, she is know this Boy’s Town?”
“I was there with friends. We saw a real good show. I can’t remember the name of it…”
Alfredo lifted his eyebrows, smiled weakly. “La Puerta Alegre? The Joyful Door? Is the same, no?”
Darlene leaned forward. “It’s men and women, you know, up on a stage, doing it?”
Harley began to sober.
ALFREDO PARKED THE little VW. Harley and Darlene got out and followed him on the sidewalk. Dirty children clog
ged their path, palms up, guardedly watching Harley and his broken face. “Pesos? Pesos?”
Alfredo turned on the children, screamed in Spanish, shook his fist.
Darlene made a face. “Ain’t this just awful?”
Harley fell silent, adrift in some netherworld.
On either side women leaned over the parapets of flat roofs between laundry lines and terracotta pots overflowing with flowers. They called down, cooed from windows and alleyways—mouths of crimson, pink, persimmon. Darlene snapped her gum at them.
Alfredo opened a door in a concrete-block wall violent with graffiti. A blanket of cigarette smoke smelling of stale beer and soured laundry rolled over and sucked out on the draft. Just inside, a white T-shirt sat in the darkness behind a card table. Harley made out the eyes above, the whites of a big Negro man. Beyond, a crowd whistled and yelled in the smoky light of a small stage.
“Buenas tardes,” Alfredo said to the big Negro. “I bring good customers to my friends at La Puerta Alegre.”
A roar of laughter sounded from inside. Harley looked past to see a skinny man in big polka-dotted boxers run across the stage, high-stepping vaudeville-style, a naked fat woman with huge breasts chasing after him with a rolling pin.
“Ten bucks,” the Negro said. A sapper lay on the table, handcuffs locked to his belt loop.
Harley stared into the darkened room. “Forget it,” he said. “We’re leaving.”
Darlene hesitated, the excitement in her eyes failing. “What…?”
He stepped back out into the sunlight.
Darlene burst out after him. “Are you crazy? I’m not going anywhere!”
“Suit yourself.” He headed for Alfredo’s VW at the curb, Alfredo close on his heels.
A girl of ten or eleven appeared at Harley’s side. “Señor, you like little girl?”
Darlene stopped, crossed her arms. “Dammit, Harley Jay! What’s wrong with you?”
Harley turned on Alfredo. “Let’s get this car back across that bridge! Now!” He jerked the door open and fell into the backseat.
Alfredo got in behind the wheel. He looked anxiously at Darlene on the sidewalk. “But the señorita, amigo?”
“She doesn’t want to go, leave her.”
Alfredo’s shoulders hunched. “Señor, it is not good to leave the señorita in this place.”
“Two dólares only,” the little girl pleaded at Harley’s window.
More children crowded around Darlene on the sidewalk. “Un peso, señora? Un peso, por favor?”
Harley leaned forward, one hand on the door handle. “You gonna go, or am I gonna have to get another cab?”
“No, no! I take you!” Alfredo started the VW. On the sidewalk, Darlene stiffened as the VW eased into the street.
“Wait!” Darlene ran out past the children and alongside the VW, eyes flashing. “Harley Jay, you goddamn goody-goody-two-shoes son of a bitch!”
Harley whipped a five-dollar bill over the seat at Alfredo. “Move it!”
Alfredo downshifted and they moved out again, Darlene shouting after them. They stopped at the corner to make a turn. Darlene ran up and jerked the door open and fell into the backseat beside Harley. Alfredo sighed with relief, then hunched his shoulders as she slammed the door, rocking the little VW.
“A little shopping for the señorita? Leather boots? Handbags? Sandalias?”
“Get this damn wreck moving,” Harley said.
Alfredo let them off in the parking lot, bowing, mopping his brow, showing his big toothy smile as Harley shoved a handful of bills at him.
Alfredo’s eyes lit up. “Hasta luego, mis amigos. Gracias. Gracias.”
Darlene stood aside, arms crossed, face sharp as a hatchet. Harley unlocked the rental car.
Chapter 51
Doodlebug Town
“I HAVE TO PEE,” Darlene said, breaking the silence that had shrouded them in the car for the last hour.
“Piss your pants for all I care.” But he had to go too. The stock pond was coming up in that ninety-mile stretch of nothingness between Del Rio and Sonora, and he pulled off and brought the car to a stop in a straggly stand of nearby mesquite trees. The pond was still, its sheet-glass surface reflecting a gray winter sky in the late afternoon. The dirt all about was fine as talcum, dotted with the hoof prints of livestock, peppered with thousands of inverted doodlebug cones.
Darlene took tissues from a box behind the seat and got out. Wordless, she marched off toward a clump of scrub in a shallow cut some thirty yards away. He went into the scrub in the opposite direction. When he returned, he opened the trunk, removed the bottle of Avión Reopsado tequila he’d bought in Acuña, poured an inch into a paper cup, then put the bottle back and shut the trunk lid. He sat on the stone lip of the stock tank, gazing toward the distant mountains where the evening sun looked like a dim dime against the flatted winter sky. At his feet, hundreds of little funnels pocked the finely powdered dirt. He picked up a straw and tickled a few grains down into one of the cones. The doodlebug popped up through the fine grit at the bottom, eager to grab its prey.
Darlene returned, cutting her eyes at him as she sashayed back to the car. “Drowning your sorrows, shit-face?” She sat in the front passenger’s seat with the door open, kicked her sandals off and placed her bare feet on the dash. She unwrapped a new plug of Bazooka, plopped it in her mouth and sat, frowning, reading the comic wrapper.
He recalled a saying his grandfather had, regarding gum-chewers: “The gum-chewing girl, and the cud-chewing cow; they’re both alike, but different somehow. Ah, I see it now, it’s the contented look on the cud-chewing cow.” But he resisted the urge to relate it to Darlene.
He crushed the empty cup, then took it back to the car and pitched it in the rear footwell alongside Darlene’s tackle box. He slid in behind the wheel but the keys were missing from the ignition.
“Give me the keys,” he said.
“So who’s in charge of going or staying now!” She craned her neck, stuck her tongue in the bubble gum and blew a big pink bubble at him. He swatted it aside; it poofed flat against her cheek. Though he hadn’t touched her, she jumped back in surprise. She swept back over the seat and before he realized what she was doing, she grabbed a wire coat hanger and swiped him across the jaw, then again on the bandaged bridge of his nose before he could grab her flailing arms. He managed to get one foot up in the seat against her hip, and shoved with all his might. She went sailing out the open door and hit the ground with a grunt.
He leaped out, snatched the tackle box from behind the seat, snapped it open and began grabbing vibrators, flipping the switches on, throwing them high in the air, one after another—plastic peckers raining down, plopping in the soft dirt, humming, little mushroom clouds of dust billowing up.
Darlene’s face warped into a mask of fury, teeth bared, eyes flashing. Head lowered, she came charging around the car.
With all his strength, he threw the tackle box high over the pond. It turned end over end, then came down and hit the water—slush—as Darlene plowed into him. They went down in a tangle of arms and legs. She kicked and gouged and scratched. He got his arm around her neck from behind. She tried to bite him, but he chocked her in the crook of one arm while trying to dig the car keys out of her pocket with the other. For one instant, he relived the fight they’d had over the horned lizard when they were kids. The top button popped on her jeans. He grabbed the zipper, jerked it down and scrambled to his feet. He caught her pant cuffs and jerked hard, bouncing her on her butt—if he couldn’t get the keys out of her pocket, he’d get them pants and all. Her jeans slipped down but she hooked them behind her knees and held to the waistband with both hands. He dragged her through the dirt, her teeth bared, snarling, trailing spit. Plastic peckers kicked up mushroom clouds as he plowed her through doodlebug town.
She let go. Her jeans slipped off. He went flying backward and slammed into the car, knocked breathless. He grabbed the keys out and threw her jeans out over the car, but she was
on him, teeth and nails. She caught him by the hair, but he managed to fend her off with his shoulder. She tried to knee him in the groin, tried to drive her heels into his back, but he drew her in close so she could hardly move. She snarled slobber in his face, huffed steam up his throbbing nose. He grabbed her hair in turn, yanked her head back and burrowed his face in close, his nose protected in the hollow of her neck.
There was no definitive point at which one stopped and the other started—the furious fighting into furious sex. One segued into the other with hardly a pause—she had him by both ears, faltered, and instead of trying to bite his face off, held both hands tight behind his head, hooked her heels behind his knees and drew him to her, pressing herself against him—a frenzied moment as her hands fumbled his pants open. He suffered a moment of stark terror as she took his penis in hand. But instead of ripping his testicles off, she stripped her own panties down with one hand, and guided him up between her legs with the other until, with what seemed a mind of its own, his penis rippled up into her in a flood of heat.
They bucked and shoved and pushed; they moaned and groaned and tried to squeeze the life out of each other, knocking into the car, plowing up the weeds. Darlene began to howl, she began to jump, she began to tremble and shake and kick her feet; her panties flounced back and forth on one foot like a caution flag at a racetrack. The spit flew.
Finally they lay still alongside the car, Darlene’s body heaving under his as they sucked for air. She turned her eyes up to him, a dazed expression.
He stared, at a loss as to what had actually happened. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been love or intimacy in any recognizable form. Anger? Hate? Lust? It wasn’t rape, at least not on his part; she had been the initiator. Even so, he recognized that it was an act of violence—on her part as well as his. But why had he even had an erection? For that matter, why had he even driven her down here in the first place? His mind was a mishmash, a confusion of fragmented thoughts, impressions, sensations—Whitehead, Sherylynne, Leah, his family, Darlene, Frankie.
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