The Dogs of Mexico (36 page)

She followed him along the creek until they came to the blacktop. A stone culvert trailed a thin stream of mossy water underneath. They dropped the luggage and sank down among the ferns in the shade of wild philodendron and sumac. Ana pinched her shirtfront and fanned it in and out for the little breeze it made.

“Somebody’s coming,” he said. “If it’s a bus I’ll flag it down.”

Ana pulled a mat of hair away from her face. “We can’t get on a bus like this.”

The Plymouth rose over the crest of the hill and cruised down the blacktop toward them.

“Aw, shit.” Robert cocked both guns and handed the .22 to Ana. They flattened themselves among the ferns.
 

When the car was a hundred yards away, it slowed and stopped. The top of Geraldo’s head was just visible behind the steering wheel. Then the car backed up, made a K-turn and moved up the road in the opposite direction.

“He must be stoned out of his gourd to expose himself like that.” Robert took the .22 from Ana again, set the safety and put it in his belt.

She stayed close as they hurried the luggage over the narrow blacktop and slid down into the ditch on the other side.
 

They pushed through the underbrush for fifteen minutes, following the creek until they came to a spot where it broadened into a pool among a copse of trees. Robert let his bags down near an outcrop of boulders along the water’s edge. Surrounding the pool were the ever-present palmettos, philodendron, sumac, ferns, vines, creepers. Narrow trails dotted with animal scat fanned cut through the brush—cloven tracks belonging to goats, deer, pigs and other tracks he couldn’t identify. The water was clear and cool looking, the gravel bottom visible for some distance before surface reflections interfered.
 

Ana sat on the aluminum case, elbows on her knees, forehead cupped in her hands.
 

Robert could only guess at how badly Geraldo was wounded but from the way he limped Robert doubted he would attempt this terrain on foot. Geraldo was able to drive, yes, but the Plymouth had an automatic shift and a one-legged man could manage that. Again he wondered at the effectiveness of the Beretta at such a distance. It had been a miracle that he hit Geraldo at all.

He attempted to affirm directions, recalling that moss grew on the north side of trees. But apparently these trees never heard that, one side looking about as mossy as the other. He studied the light again. Midmorning maybe.

“Let’s wash up,” he said. “Get some of this muck off. Then we’ll see about getting out of here.”

Ana stared into the pool, a vague distracted cast in her eyes.
 

“I don’t know how long he’s going to run up and down that road, but if he’s hurt as bad as I hope, he’s going to have to get that leg looked at. We might stay here tonight, let him clear out, then go back to the road in the morning, see if we can catch a bus out of here.”

Ana looked about at the surrounding wilderness. “Out here? All night?”

“We’ll go on up the creek, maybe find another truck. But like you say, we can’t go knocking around out there looking like this.”

Ana touched her swollen lips, felt gingerly over her face, picked her fingers through her hair.
 

Robert checked the safeties on the .22 and the .380, and placed them on a rock ledge near the water. He opened the maroon carry-on and took out the shampoo and the Ivory bar. “Come on, that water looks good. We’re going to give ourselves a little beauty treatment.”

Ana slanted a look at him. He tried to offer up a reassuring smile but he wasn’t sure what his face was doing. She turned away as he took his shirt off and stepped out of his pants. Soap and shampoo in hand, he waded into the water in his boxers. The pool was little more than waist-deep. Schools of minnows could be seen darting in formation over the pebbled bottom. Sunlight filtered through the trees and sparkled on the surface. He experienced a sudden rush of euphoria—thrilled even by the burning sensation of water on the raw flesh around his ankles and wrists, amazed that they were still alive. He pitched the soap bar upstream. It plunked in the water, popped up and floated slowly toward him.
 

“Ivory, it floats.” He glanced about in mock bewilderment. “This a commercial? Where’s that hidden camera?”

Ana looked at him, uncertain, then lowered her gaze.

“Come on. Get on down here in this old hot tub.”

She stared into the water.

“You’ve got to get cleaned up. You’ll feel better.”

She looked about again, then methodically took a change of clothes from her bag and began unbuttoning her shirt. “Don’t look.”

He caught the soap as it drifted near and tossed it back upstream, ducked his head under, resurfaced, fingered a squeeze of shampoo into his hair and worked up a frothy lather. His broken lips and the split over his eye stung, as well as his wrists and ankles. He let his head under again and scrubbed the suds out until he felt clean. He recalled Mickey in Acapulco, coming out of the bathroom freshly showered, her little-girl gum-chewing smile—
Hey chill, soap and hot water, the all-time great invention of mankind
.
 

In his peripheral vision he was aware of Ana pulling on clean underpants. “Come on,” he said. “You’ve got five minutes.”

She waded in, her back to him, and knelt, water lapping at her chin.

“Here, I’ll bring you the shampoo.”

She took it over her shoulder and then let her head under. She resurfaced, blowing air. The bite wound on her neck had swollen, a circle of purple indents in an inflamed mound of reddish flesh.
 

“It burns,” she said.

“Don’t get water in your mouth.”

She squeezed shampoo into her palm and gingerly worked it into her hair. When she had a good lather, she took a breath, pinched her nostrils shut and let her head under again. She
 
worked the fingers of her free hand through her hair. Reddish-brown suds floated free and drifted downstream. She surfaced, blowing bursts of air through compressed lips. She lathered and rinsed again—over and over until the suds floated free and clean.

“I’m so thirsty,” she said.

“Don‘t. Make you sick as a dog. Here, here’s the soap.”

She lowered her gaze to the mirror of water under her chin, turned her back, scrubbed the bar over her body underwater.

He gave her a few moments. Then, “Time to get out now and get dressed.”

“I’m not clean.”

“Sure you are.”

She let go the soap, cupped her face in her hands. “I’ll never be clean again…ever…”
 

Robert recalled the beating he had taken from the cops in Hardwater, how it had done something to him. There were all kinds of ways to hurt and be hurt and the worst didn’t always show. The work he had been a part of in Cairo came to mind.

He stepped out of the water in his wet shorts and took a clean shirt from Ana’s things. He went back in, holding it aloft. He chose to pretend that nakedness was natural between them, though that was no longer true. He averted his eyes in deference as she waded toward him, trying to cover herself with arms and hands. Still, he saw her, slippery-wet and glistening in the dappled light, her panties wet and transparent. She turned her back while he held the shirt and guided her arms into the sleeves. She held the shirttail out of the water with first one hand then the other.
 

“Get yourself some dry undies,” he said. He changed into dry shorts himself, wrung water from the wet ones and put them in a Ziploc. “Put your wet stuff in here with mine.”

When he had changed, he stuffed his soiled clothes in the garbage bag. “I’m going to bury this under rocks. This too,” he added, taking the projector from it’s case. He turned it in his hands. “Ana, we’re leaving things here. Both of us. Understand?”

She gave him a searching look. “Yes…leaving things here. I—”

“Ayee–yi–yi–yi!
I am not too late for the skinny-dip, ’ey?”

Robert spun around. Geraldo came thrashing out of the brush, one pant leg blotched with blood, crippling, waving the Uzi at them, wildly exuberant.
 

Bracing for the shock of certain death, Robert turned and threw the projector high over the pond. It hit the water with a
ka-sloosh
.
For a moment it looked as if it might float, but then it sank, bubbling beneath the surface.

Geraldo stopped, a whimper of pain as his damaged leg gave way and he fumbled to regain his balance. “Hijo de la gran puta!” he shouted. Still he didn’t shoot, but kept up a little shimmying in-place dance that visibly pained him, but which he seemed to have no control over.

Robert started to reach for his .380, but it lay with the .22 on the rock ledge on the other side of Ana.

Geraldo took a few wobbling steps into the water, craning his neck, staring at the spot where the canister had gone under. “Estúpido!”
He jerked the Uzi around and again Robert thought he was done for. “Give me the guns or I kill you!”
 

An incoherent sound escaped Ana. Robert saw she was on her feet, that she had the .380 and was fumbling, trying to cock and fire it.
 

Geraldo swung the Uzi toward her. “Stop! Give me the pistola!”
Still he didn’t fire.
 

Ana tried desperately to pull the trigger—but the safety was on.
 

Geraldo visibly relaxed. “Ah. Sí, sí. You don’ have no more bullets, eh?” He took a step toward Ana, dragging his leg, sloshing through the water. “Give me the pistola, then you and me, we finish the little forkey-diddle-diddle.”
 

A faint
tick
sounded as Ana thumbed the safety off. Geraldo’s wheezing laughter failed as he realized his mistake. In the same moment, the .380 kicked up with a sharp
bam.
One side of Geraldo’s face erupted, his head jerking sideways. Birds beat up from the trees and whirred into the distance. Ana fired two more slugs into Geraldo as he floundered, collapsing face down in the water. She fired until the slider locked, and still she crouched, arms jerking as she tried to fire the empty gun.

38

Disposables

“
O
H, GOD
,” Ana whispered in the sudden after-silence before the insects resumed their tuneless music. “Oh, God… Oh, God!” Robert caught his arms around her as her knees buckled and she dropped the gun. She began to wail, her face contorted, tears running down her cheeks. With a chill he realized she wasn’t crying, but laughing—a shrill humorless keening. “See what we did?” she gurgled. “See what we did?”
 

“Ana!” he shouted. “Stop it!” He guided her down, helping her sit on one of the boulders, then knelt and held her as she rocked back and forth, the manic laughter turning to broken sobs as she began to regain control.
 

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered. He placed one hand on her forehead, touched the arterial vein in her neck. “Let me know if you start feeling cold. We don’t want you going into shock.”

She looked at him, vague, eyes glimmering, small convulsive sobs.

He lifted her hair back from her face, thumbed wet streaks from her cheek. “Ana, we need to clear out of here. I’ll help you carry your things over there behind the brush if you want to change.” He nodded toward Geraldo. “I’ve got to get him out of there.”
 

She said nothing, but stared past him into the brush.

He slowly let go his hold on her, then reloaded the .380 and tucked it and the .22 in his belt. “Come on now. Let’s get you dressed.” He gentled her to her feet, took her bag and walked her around an outcrop of rock and brush. When he felt she was reasonably stable, he went back for the Ziploc containing his wet shorts. “Get some dry clothes on. Wring the water out of those and put them in here with mine. I’ll be back as soon as I get this other business out of the way.”
 

With a vague, detached expression, she knelt and opened her bag.

“You get dressed, then lie down on my jacket. Prop your feet up, higher than your head.”

She stood by, mute, waiting for him to leave.
 

On a rise up to the left of the pond, he inspected a cluster of boulders half hidden in a thicket of brush. When he came back down, Ana had dressed and smoothed a band-aid over the gash on her forehead. He admired her presence of mind as she looked into a compact mirror, thinning a little makeup over her bruises to avoid attention once they were among people again.

Robert dug his dirty jeans out of the garbage bag, changed back into them, then rolled the cuffs up and waded barefoot into the pool. Minnows made concentric rings on the surface, striking at bits of organic matter in the syrupy stain ebbing from Geraldo’s slack, little-boy body. Robert took Geraldo’s belt off and looped it in a figure eight around his boots at his ankles; then he caught the belt where it crisscrossed and dragged him out. Blood leaked through the sandy gravel back into the pond.
 

Robert dried his feet on his soiled shirt, slipped his shoes on without socks, and dragged Geraldo up the hill by the crisscrossed belt. Geraldo’s ruptured head knocked through the weeds behind, his tattooed and cigarette-scarred arms trailed loosely. Insects rose clicking from the weeds in their path and dropped at a distance.

When Robert reached the thicket, he went through Geraldo’s pockets and reclaimed his watch. Still keeping time—eleven a.m. He stuffed it and the keys to the Plymouth in his pocket. There was little else—Jinx’s gold chain with Mickey’s halo, a prescription bottle with a dozen pills, a few Mexican coins and a hand-tooled wallet with leather-laced edges. In the wallet he found Geraldo’s Mexican drivers license, a single hundred-peso note and a Telmex phone card worth eighty pesos. Robert put Mickey’s navel ring in his pocket, then replaced everything but Geraldo’s license.
 

He maneuvered Geraldo’s body into the brush and wedged it into an alcove where the bases of two large boulders came together. He stood back, sticky hands held out at either side. Sunlight dappled down through the foliage playing on Geraldo and on the weeds equally.