The Ultimate Good Luck (18 page)

He walked the last shaded blocks to the bungalow. Things were quiet and protected in the colonia, a universe apart from down the hill. Two of the schoolgirls got off and walked hurriedly the
other way, talking in hushed voices. The Dodge was parked below the gate where he’d left it. He remembered the lavaliere under the seat, and decided it would go better when they were gone tomorrow. He wondered exactly how long it took news to get as far away as Minnesota. He thought it couldn’t take long.

Rae was sitting in the living room beside the blank television. The light in the room was liquid and green. The floor had been scrubbed and a white film left on. He was thinking about the money. “Did the moza come?” he said, and walked to the bathroom. Grey water stood in a puddle at the base of the shower. He got on his knees and ran his finger along the groove. Water didn’t matter, but the tiles could get stepped on.

Rae stood barefooted at the door watching him. She had on his plaid bathrobe. She looked woozy. “Do you think
she’d
steal it?” Rae said.

“Only if she found it,” he said. He moved to the tiles behind the toilet.

“Do you fuck her too?” Rae said. “She’s pretty. We exchanged nasties while she cleaned. She said you were very
amable
and very
generoso
with her.”

“That’s right.” His knees were wet and the floor smelled piny where the girl had scrubbed with solvent and sprayed with O.K.O. She was a Mixtec girl with ulcers who was learning to read in the technological college. She had asked help with her letters, and he had demonstrated an upper-case
Q
.

He dug the paste with his fingers and lifted the tiles off the pistol. Water had seeped and beaded on the bluing. Grouting was already crumbled into the cylinder.

“Do you need that?” she said earnestly. She was holding onto the doorjamb, staring at the gun as if it were an odd color. She had taken something. But there was no use hassling it.

“You never can tell.” He sat back on his knees and dropped the cylinder.

“Are you going to kill somebody?” she said.

He looked at her. He had just an afterimage of Deats’ $200 alligator shoes standing in the filthy water. He was ready to shoot Deats now. There wasn’t any more doubt. “Did anybody come?” he said.

“No,” Rae said. She shook her head. Her face was pale in the aqueous light. He got off his knees and brought the gun to the living room where the light was truer.

“Did you like the tour?” he said. He sat on the davenport, tore a strip off his handkerchief, and emptied the rounds into the rest of it.

Rae sat facing him, her bare knees under the hem of the bathrobe like the Catholic girls on the bus. She kept watching him, holding herself together. “They have men up there who slip through the bushes behind the ruins to sell you jade. They whisper at you,” she said. “I left when I saw that. It’s all fake. They have them in Santa Fe at the pueblos. Some farmer always finds something. Antigüedad. It’s just bullshit.”

“The ruins are real, though, right?” he said.

“Do you want to know where I went when I left in the night last year? Or even why?”

He used the tine of his belt buckle to force the handkerchief down the barrel of the Smith & Wesson, then squeezed the nub end back through the breech. “I don’t much care,” he said. She seemed argumentative, and he understood it. He just didn’t want to be that way now. The gun gave him a sense of relief.

She ran her hand through her hair and sat back in the chair. “I thought I’d try to find a place I liked, since I never had before. But I couldn’t. Isn’t that sad? It all seemed so bad. So I went to the dog races. I thought I might see where I went wrong. Just for luck.” He picked up each cartridge separately and wiped it with the clean part of the handkerchief. They were still oily. He took the strip and pushed through each empty chamber. It needed solvent and the right brushes. Her conversation didn’t interest him. “Then I went back to Tesuque, and then daddy got sick, and then I just sat around Bay Shore. I tend just to let
things happen sometimes,” she said. “I can’t survive being alienated very long.”

“You should’ve taken up with those high rollers in the plaid suits,” he said.

“How did you feel?” she said, ignoring him.

He looked up at her. “You should’ve stayed around. You could’ve found out.” He held the trigger and let the hammer ease in and out of the pin slot, listening for grit. There wasn’t any, and he wiped the cylinder and began sliding the rounds back.

“I couldn’t ever tell what the hell your life was in behalf of,” she said.

“So do you know now?” he said.

“I forgive you, though,” she said. He looked at her. “For being a fuck and for making me have to run out of there.”

“I didn’t want to have to ask you for anything else,” he said. He put the last round in the chamber and closed the cylinder slowly with his thumb and his middle finger until the spring locked conclusively and the cylinder wound up to train on the pin. “I didn’t want to get lost. Do you know what I mean?”

She shook her head. “That’s not being in love.”

“It’s close though,” he said. He took the gun and put it between the cushions of the davenport, not too deep to get at easily. He pulled it out and pushed it in. Deats would be in the bungalow again, and he wanted it set up right. The Italian girl’s face rotated up in his mind, the thing about not having a clear frame of reference. He wanted a clear frame of reference with Rae, but it kept expanding all the time.

“Why does it just have to be close, goddamn it.” She was crying, but she was Darvoned out, and she couldn’t cry very hard. “I don’t like that,” she said. “Close isn’t good enough. There’s nothing nice in that.”

He felt all right about the gun. He walked to the window and gazed over the terraced bungalows and TV antennas toward Monte Albán, south of which the sun was an orange helix subsiding into the mountains. “No, there’s not,” he said.

“It’s just all a loss to you, isn’t it?” she said. “And you have to prevent that at all costs. You have to keep yourself protected all the time.”

“I think that’s wrong,” he said. He liked the dun texture of the mountains once the sun was gone, and the light was all residue.

“And that’s why you came down here, isn’t it? Because it’s as mean as you are, and you can test yourself.” She wiped at her eyes with her hand and glared at him. It was just leftover anger.

“I came because you asked me to,” he said. “I thought there might not be another chance.” He walked across the room.

“There wouldn’t be,” she said.

“Then I guess I was right,” he said as he opened the door and walked toward the car to get the lavaliere. It was as good a time as there would ever be.

After dark he lay on the bedspread, dressed, waiting for Bernhardt’s car, waiting for the headlights to crawl the windows. He could hear insects in the wall behind his head. His stomach was quiet and emptied, and he felt articulated in the dark. He thought about a girl he’d fucked when Rae had left, a nursing-college girl from Ann Arbor, slumming in the ski bars at Shanty Creek and Mount Mancelona, east of Charlevoix. She was nineteen and had braided hair and long white arms, and seemed at ease being alone. When she had her clothes off, on the bed inside the trailer, looking cheerful as if everything was familiar, she said suddenly, “My father died last month, see, and I felt like no one had ever made an effort to know him, not even my mom.” She smiled as if this was what she wanted to talk about more than anything. “And I was really tired, see, of hearing about movie stars and football players, all kinds of other people who had died.” She stopped a moment and thought while she unpinned her hair. “A lot of great human beings die and never get any
attention, and it makes me angry. Do you know what I mean? They just disappear.” She let her hair fall down and shook it and put the pins one at a time on the nightstand.

“I guess so,” Quinn said, staring at his boots on the cold floor. Her life was complicated with events that obligated her, that were limitlessly signifying and engrossing, but that didn’t make any difference to him. He tried to think of his old man and couldn’t, tried to think if anybody had paid attention to his old man and couldn’t remember. And it suddenly made him feel trapped, as if empty space was closing down around him, and made him sick with longing, a way he thought he wouldn’t feel once Rae was out of it, but that he couldn’t keep back now, a feeling of detachment and impairment, something he didn’t want ever to happen and thought he had figured how to prevent, but had failed.

“I bet you were in Nam,” the girl said and smiled at him happily and took his hand and held it to her cheek.

“What makes you think so?” he said.

“You got that tattoo,” she said. “You don’t look like a biker.” She leaned to turn off the light. “But that’s cool. You don’t care about my father. We couldn’t be here if you did, right? You’d have too much sympathy for me.”

Rae sat at the foot of the bed. He could smell her perfume in the dark air, could feel her nervousness. “I can’t be ironic with you, Harry,” she said quietly. “I sat out there and wanted to be but I couldn’t. I don’t protect myself well enough, do I? I just get mad.”

“Do you still want me to protect you?” he said. He thought he might be able to, the first time ever.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t like the way you think about things. You look at everything like it disappears down a hole that nothing ever comes out of. And that scares me.” He listened for Bernhardt’s car in the street. “Doesn’t that make you lonely?”

“That’s not the right question,” Quinn said.

“I’m sorry, then. What’s a good question?” she said.

“Whether it makes any difference to me if I
am
lonely,” he said.

“That’s what scares me most,” she said. “Because it doesn’t, does it?”

“I’m trying to think it does,” he said. She lay beside him on the bed, and he could feel her heart beating throughout the room. “I’m trying real hard right now to think it does.”

“Then maybe that’s a good sign,” she said. “I shouldn’t ask for a lot more.”

M
OST OF THE STREETS
leading into the Centro had been barricaded. Garrison troops in orange helmets patrolled the coils of concertina wire separating the open streets, their small eyes glowering at the sweeping headlights. Something was on now. The town seemed safer, as if a lock of certainty had been put on public life. Bernhardt drove carefully. He took the narrow streets beyond the Juárez Market, and through the section where the overland trucks were repaired. Lights in the crowded bays were blue and phosphorescent, and men’s legs hung off the open hoods. Acetylene smacked in the thick air and made the night appealing.

Bernhardt was weaving toward the carretera, staying near the curbs and making his turns elaborately. At an intersection the zócalo appeared suddenly back down the inky streets, the cathedral kliegs at the end gaseous and silver and imprecise. Soldiers stood in the middle ground, their rifles picketing the light, and the shrill sound of whistles came out of the dark. It was like Mardi gras, looking up Orleans toward Jackson Park at 4:00
A.M
., the odd insulated feeling of time being lost.

“Where’re we going?” Quinn said.

“The country,” Bernhardt replied expansively. “Don’t worry about the soldiers.”

“What’re they doing?” Rae said from the back seat.

“Searching for paintings, or what they can find. Terrorism is faulty, it exposes unexpected things. Other people’s business sometimes.”

“Like yours?” Quinn said.

“No,” Bernhardt said and shook his head smiling. “My business is in the daylight only.”

“I don’t see why they close the main streets and leave the dark ones open,” Rae said. Her voice was flat and expressionless, like the soldiers’ eyes. She was staring at the dark buildings that slid by the edge of the headlights. She had on the lavaliere with the dancing man. The polished silver lit up the shadows.

“Some streets are secured so they may be used to different purposes,” Bernhardt said, engaged. “In the dark if you are not the army maybe you are a criminal. And if there is a mistake it must be hidden.” Bernhardt had on a shiny white camisola, embroidered like the one the deputy of penitentiaries had worn the day before, though more elegant and expensive. It made him seem more Mexican than before, as if he had shucked something self-conscious in his character that had never fit.