The Ultimate Good Luck (7 page)

Rae said her brother was in Los Angeles playing Industrial leagues basketball and her father was a landscape painter in Bay Shore, and that she didn’t have any plans. She said she could have stayed with Frank or not stayed with him, and that while it wasn’t necessarily any good, it wasn’t necessarily bad either. Until Frank broke his reins hand in a calf rope in Houston and had to lay off riding. She told Frank she would go to work painting street portraits if he’d buy her an easel and some brushes, and instead he had driven them to New Orleans and gotten in touch with an Italian he knew who was exclusively stealing Alfa Romeos and loading them on boats to Venezuela, and told her she didn’t have to work and put her up in the Monteleone Hotel. Though after the first week he’d gotten busted, and when Rae bailed him out of the Orleans Parish jail she told him something would have to change or she was splitting, and he had taken her to the dog track and stood her under the TV monitor in the middle of the main pavilion and told her that when she got ready to, she could start making money the best way she could, using the Southwind out at the end of the parking lot under the row of palmettos.

She smiled at Quinn in the half-light and stretched her long arm up into the cool shadows. “I was resisting not being young anymore. I was almost thirty. It’s textbook. It’s my penance.” She was just waiting to find the reason not to take him seriously, but she had a sweet unpretending elegance he felt at ease with, and
she talked not because she thought it was important, but because they passed the time in an amusing way. “Maybe I’m a bum,” she said. “I just missed being a hippie.”

He could see the little pit fires on Ship Island twinkle in the night like stars. They didn’t remind him of anything, and he was at ease for the first time he could remember.
“You
can’t call yourself a bum,” he said. “Somebody else has to do that. You don’t get it both ways.”

Rae sighed a long sigh. “But is that what you think about me?” she said, not interested in it. “You’ve been protecting our country’s honor. You should be an authority.”

“I don’t know you well enough,” he said, and ran his hand over her flat stomach.

“No judgments on the first date?”

“I’m not an authority on anything,” he said. “That’s all.”

“That’s nice,” she said, and kissed him sweetly on the mouth. “Don’t let me put any pressure on you. I don’t want to do that. This’ll be over soon enough.”

She told him that when he saw her standing under the monitor she’d been there four hours holding the same win tickets, watching every race and the empty track in between, and trying not to get uptight, but hoping all the time something would come along to improve her prospects before the lights went out. She said turning her out was just Frank’s way of saying good-bye, everybody had a way of saying good-bye, and if when Quinn showed up they’d have gone out and looked for the Southwind with the painting of Mount Rainier, it wouldn’t have been there.

“Those little self-contained systems just get smaller,” she said, when Quinn was almost asleep. “They’re fine. But they don’t tolerate enough. You know what I mean? You don’t, do you?” He could hear her in a drowse. “They’re like Frank. They make things simple. I thought I could get along with that. I should have figured it out a long time ago that I couldn’t.”

The Fourier she had was a loaner from the New Orleans Public Library, and she left it in a Tote-Sum in Mississippi City and
didn’t ask to go back and get it when she found out it was gone.

He was drawn to her. She was his first serious business since he’d come back, and she made him feel hooked up, even if he hadn’t planned on a permanent guest. He wasn’t sure what exactly he was doing with her, but it didn’t feel like the wrong thing, and it beat Route 90 in the Alamo Plaza rolling for beers, hustling fat coon-ass girls, then lurching back drunk at 5:00
A.M
. by himself with no place to go but Seconal-land. Rae’d get stoned after midnight with the light on in the little pink hotel room and tell him there was something interesting about him from having been in the war. He didn’t seem, she said, at all ready to kill anybody and loud noises didn’t make him duck. He was like a doctor, she said, who cured exotic diseases and who had some of the disease left on him, but only enough to make her not want to split right away. Splitting, she said, had gotten to be a specialty.

After six days Quinn drove back to Morgan, checked out of the Alamo Plaza, rented a little railroad house on stilts outside the levee up Six Mile Palourde and moved Rae in, then went back running pipe to the rigs on Atchafalaya. Rae hit St. Vincent de Paul’s for furniture, bought an easel, and sat out afternoons drawing from
National Geographic
s and
Audubon
s out of the Parish bookmobile, and playing the Eagles into the cypress swamps, stoned.

There was a feeling Louisiana was just another place for her, like Bay Shore or New Mexico, and she simply adapted right. But he felt like there was some hollow place in
him
where she made a feeling come at night. Whatever he wanted to do, it seemed like in her judgment she wanted to do it, though it was clear to him it didn’t matter to her who she was with as long as she got adjusted for what she was doing moment to moment. She was locked in present time, he thought, and she was calm and deliberate as if she understood that, even understood the desperation to it, desperation she knew all about and could recognize but didn’t need to acknowledge, as if it was obvious to anybody who knew her and perfectly natural and something to
smile about, even if what he felt was the same desperation, only for different reasons.

Sitting out on the high porch with the music, watching her row herself patiently, with long, graceful arms and a green paisley scarf on her head, out into the black water of the Palourde to sit and fish for crappies in the sunshine, he figured she made up what she needed as she went, the complicated parts included now. Nothing got by her. And she seemed older than he was, with a view of the world she had learned to put herself into with ease, and, if he wanted her to do it, could put him in, too, though that wasn’t absolutely necessary to her survival, since she wasn’t waiting for anything else to come along that hadn’t already come once.

After three months with her he took papers as a fitter’s helper and began taking extra days filling spots on the rigs when somebody was slow turning around. It started to make him feel dangerously
in
something to be in the house seven days, eating and sleeping all alone with her, listening to her mellowed-out music and sitting watching her paint from magazines slowly and calculatedly. Awake at 2:00
A.M
. listening to the lizards on the porch and the mosquitoes zizzing through the dense blanket of air, he would start to drift away, and she would suddenly moan out in the darkness and flinch hard and hold him until he couldn’t breathe. And he had to get out of the room and stand on the porch where the air was cooler and get calm. He thought with anybody sooner or later you got to an end point, one last event in a series of events at the end of which there was just a wall of empty air and things got invisible, and then you were in it with them, like it or not, and you had to make up whatever else came along. That was what Frank Oliver had figured out when he left her standing with a handful of win tickets. In the war you maintained your crucial distance from things and that kept you alive, and kept everything out in front of you and locatable. It was why Frank had his cars and his saddle broncs and his Southwind, and why he got scared the moment he even thought he might lose
them. He could see all that and negotiate it. He probably hated to lose her. But he saw how much he was losing control
with
her, and he couldn’t handle it. It was like losing track of a rule, not even that she wanted it lost, but just that she didn’t need a rule herself. And mornings, when he would wake up in the bed, he’d be sweating and as far away from her as he could be, his shoulders and his fingers aching, his head full of noise. And he’d lie in the grey swamp light, feel her breathing, and wish he could move off on some other safer plane of existence, someplace maybe not too far, but far enough to be safe.

On the rig they told him that in L.A. if he could make the airplane factories and the Exxon rigs up the Catalina Channel and kept his name alive, something would pop open in a month. He had eight thousand in the Morgan Bank, and if he stayed four more months he could double it on layoffs, and if you were taking chances what you needed was money. But he thought he needed to make a move. If he was going to stay with Rae—and he wanted to—he needed to get someplace where there was a legitimate outside and where the outside risks were higher than the inside ones. Because where he was now all the risks were the kind you couldn’t see, and those were the ones that scared him. It was his own doing and not hers, he knew. But everything was your own doing one way or another, and you had to live by yourself with the results at the end.

H
E FELT FEVERISH
for the first time now. His bowels had begun to quease and his mouth was sticky, and he had a sweat up. Sick was dangerous, he knew that. Sick never made you scared, just reluctant, and that was worse. Everybody in Vietnam had been sick, but the rhythm had geared down gradually, and the war had finally been run on sick time. People depended on each other according to sick intervals, watched each other with the expectation of diseased response. But in Mexico it was dangerous. It singled you out. Only assholes who drank water or ate candy off the urethane sheets on the street corners got sick. And he was on top of that. He had put a Halazone in every glass of water and considered every bite before he took it. The one thing you didn’t want to be was sick when things began to happen, and right now he didn’t quite have it.

Bernhardt had let him out in the Centro opposite the statue of Admiral Antonio Leon, facing the west, and drove off to check on Deats, whoever he was. Oaxaca was built to the medium municipal standard of small Mexican cities, two parks and a church, catty-cornered, with an open-air portal squaring everything. Americans drinking at the outdoor tables said you could see everyone in Oaxaca in a matter of an hour, and everyone you
ever knew in a year. But that wasn’t enough of an inducement. A group of women had gotten out of a yellow and green tour bus across the zócalo park and were setting up their aluminum easels on the eminence of the cathedral. They were crisp in the way they stood easel legs between the cobbles, as if they had pictured doing it every night for a month. They looked like Americans, and they looked anxious. They intended to paint the cathedral in the straight noon light, which was a mistake, he thought, but it was serious to them.

His stomach began to cramp vigorously, and he walked across the alameda and down Hidalgo to a pharmacy. It was wrong to be in town past noon. Bad light, rain, and then it got lonely, not like an American city, and he wanted to get up the hill to the bungalow and lie down. He bought a plaquette of Lomotils and took three, standing in the farmacia doorway. Bad customers. You took Lomotils furiously in Vietnam, and they shut you down eventually and made you melancholy and forgetful. After a while they were worse than being sick. But he thought with luck he’d be out before his insides collapsed. “Kill the body, the head dies.” It was a joke then.

He walked back up Hidalgo toward where the streets changed names, to the cabstand. The streets changed names at the Centro and made the town hard to learn. He wanted to wash the prisión smell and the Italian girl off his skin before Rae showed up. And he needed to sleep, to let Sonny settle out. It would be raining in an hour, and he wanted out of the middle of things.

The Centro was crowded, and the streets were noisy and full of motorbike traffic. The air libres on the Portal were all open. Waiters stood in the arcades, snapping white napkins sullenly toward the few empty tables. Quinn walked out of the Portal and into the warm sunlight. There was a thick rain smell out of the park and the center of town felt too active with tourists and American hippies hanging with the Mexicans. There was a sense of anticipation he didn’t like. The fountains were turned on. The Zapotec women were seated on the plaza plaiting their children’s
hair, and there were a lot of blue police at the perimeter of the park in their swaybacked hats and dirty ascots, waiting for something wrong to happen that they could stomp on. The second-class buses that had been out on the highway were arriving, clogging the arterial streets, with greasy faces still at the windows and soldiers asleep in the step wells. The wire mesh Christmas bells were strung all the way round the zócalo, and there were lights in the jacarandas, and a big silver tree stood riotously on top of the band kiosk. Mexicans thought Americans wanted it to be Christmas every day and they were happy to provide the illusion.

The American women who had set up their easels beside the cathedral were already in the Portal having coffees, sitting in the oily shade admiring their intentions. At the door to the cathedral two girls in white communion dresses waited to step through the high door. While he watched, a Mexican boy in a red T-shirt appeared at the wall of the cathedral. The boy stared at the easels for a moment and at the girls standing on the stone steps, then darted down the row of easels, kicking the third legs so that the easels were all flattened in ten seconds, the paints spilled over the stones, and the boy vanished back in the crowds down Bustamante. One of the women in the Portal screamed, but most of them just sat still when they saw the easels go. It was efficient work, a nice symmetry. The women should’ve been able to tell, he thought, that precisely that event would take place. But they couldn’t. It was what made them tourists. They looked and didn’t see.

He read the American paper in the cab and tried to sit still so the Lomotil could work. Altitude had effects. One disease could imitate another. He pressed below his right floating rib. A swelling would mean hepatitis, but there was no swelling.

All the stories in the American news were published in the wrong syntax,
U.S. TEAM WINS ISRAELI RIFLE SILVER
. Below it was a photo of some American marksmen holding rifles and smiling in yarmulkes and nylon jackets. Another said
ASSOCIATION OF TWINS INTERNATIONAL MEETS
, and above it was a photo of
some fat twins. There was a story about a grandmother in South Dakota stabbing a lion to death with a button hook inside her travel camper. The story didn’t say how the lion had come inside the camper or why there was a lion around at all. Mexicans would understand it. Americans lived in an ocean-to-ocean freak show, and there was a good reason to be here where things were simple instead of up there where things were bent wrong. He checked for baseball scores in the back but there was only fútbol from the Federal District. He put his head back and closed his eyes and tried to let the pills work. Only assholes got sick. He couldn’t be sick now.