The Up-Down (6 page)

 

 

16

Pace should have guessed that his taking up with Punzy would not sit well with Bitsy. He had just purchased a bottle of Barbancourt rum when Bitsy cornered him as he stepped out of Spike and Mike's Liquor Room in Bay St. Clement. She was wearing white overalls to accommodate more comfortably her increasingly protruding stomach and a faded black Are You Experienced? Jimi Hendrix T-shirt. Her uncombed hair fell loosely around her shoulders and she was not wearing make-up. Still, she looked lovely and healthy, Pace thought, except for an expression on her face that made her appear as if she had just slaughtered a rabbit and bitten off its head. The only missing element was a smear of the decapitated creature's blood around Bitsy's mouth and chin.

“You just had to go and bang Punzy, didn't you? Damn it, Pace Roscoe Ripley, you didn't give a second's thought about how it would make me feel. Bein' pregnant and all, I mean. My emotional quotient ain't two blips off the perilous line, anyway, and then I gotta get an earful from my daddy-complected little sister who's practically the only person I've confided in concernin' your probable complicity in the upcomin' Great Event, about how she and you are romantically involved and she's fast convincin' herself that you're the man of her just-past-adolescent dreams. For your information, this is the same shit she broadcast about that decrepit, washed-up lounge lizard Mexican boozehound had a hard eight won't work any more, so don't get carried away thinkin' you're so g.d. special.”

Pace stood and stared at this wild-eyed, wild-haired harridan whose acquaintance he had no recollection of ever having made before. Bitsy was winded from delivering her diatribe and was breathing hard. Pearl-sized sweat beads decorated her forehead and her mouth was locked in a paralyzed snarl. He waited until she seemed to have regained her composure before he spoke.

“What do you mean ‘practically'?”

Bitsy was puzzled. “Huh?” she squeaked.

“You said Punzy was practically the only person you confided in about us.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I thought it was our understanding that the possibility of my complicity, as you put it, was our secret to protect Del. And don't forget your not playin' straight with me from the jump.”

Bitsy stepped back and ran her white-coated tongue around her lips as if she were cleansing them of the last few drops of rabbit blood.

“Fuck it, Pace, I'm a girl.”

“I guess my grandmama Marietta's Mob beau Marcello Santos was correct when he said, ‘Three can keep a secret if two are dead.'”

“Leave Punzy be, Pace, is all I'm sayin'. She's damaged goods. You don't know the whole story and no matter what she might have told you about herself it couldn't be the half of it. Not only that but her crazy Aztec husband is due to come crashin' out of the jungle any minute. Punzy didn't tell you he'd be huntin' her ass down?”

“She only said she wasn't sure if he would or not.”

“Well, he's comin', and knowin' Abstemio Cruz as I do, he'll sniff Punzy's cunt juice on your peckerwood pecker from a kilometer away.”

“Thanks for the warning, Bitsy. Now I'll go back to the cottage and mix myself a mojito or two.”

Pace walked past Bitsy and got into his Pathfinder. Just as he was about to turn the key in the ignition, Bitsy ran to the driver's side window and planted a kiss on the glass. Then she turned around and walked off. Pace sat there, confused, bewildered and dazed.

“All things bein' equal, Daddy,” he said aloud, hoping Sailor might hear his lament, “they ain't now and never have been.”

 

 

17

Abstemio Cruz was not about to let Punzy get away. He told his boss, Hugo Lengua, at La Pajarera, an upscale bar in the Hotel Habita in colonia Polanco, that there had been a death in his wife's family and that he needed a week off to be with her in North Carolina. The fact that Hugo Lengua was on the verge of firing him on account of his chronic tardiness and periodic vocal abuse of customers whom he felt were not appreciative enough of his musical stylings or choice of material did not occur to Cruz. Lengua granted Abstemio's request and privately decided to hire another singer-piano player while Cruz was away. If and when Abstemio returned, Hugo Lengua figured, if the new guy was working out, he'd give Cruz two weeks severance pay and wish him buena suerte. If Cruz gave him any trouble, Hugo would shoot him and have his cousin, Zoco Mochar, a top dog with the Sinaloa cartel, dispose of the body.

Cruz would have gone anyway, whether or not Lengua granted him permission. Punzy was his little blonde gringa goddess; without her, he believed, he would lose his inspiration, even his reason for living, and probably the last piece of perfect young pussy he would ever have.

Abstemio flew from Mexico City to Atlanta, then to Raleigh-Durham, where he rented a car at the airport. Driving toward Bay St. Clement, he thought about the three women who had been the most important in his early life: his mother, Dolores; his aunt, Tristessa; and his own sister, Alegría. Dolores, whose name in Spanish means pains, and her sister, Tristessa, whose name means sadness, had had very difficult lives, and together decided that Abstemio's sister should be named Alegría, which means joy and happiness, in the hope that she would have an easier existence than their own. Alegría had been a happy child, it was true, but at the age of six and a half she had been killed in a car wreck along with her father, Imprudente Ingrato. Abstemio was four at the time and thereafter bore the burden of having to endure his mother and aunt's impermeable mourning. Their bereavement was for Alegría only, not Imprudente, who by all accounts was a foolish loser, a bad gambler addicted to tequila and teenage whores. As a young man his good looks and proper manners gained him admirers and opportunities to succeed in business, but his increasingly bad habits and tawdry behavior prevented him from ever amounting to much. Barely sixteen years old when she married him, Dolores soon grew to hate him and would have been pleased had the accident taken only his life.

Abstemio bore the weight of Dolores and Tristessa's gloominess as well as he could but believed that his alcoholism and violent outbursts were a direct result of this condition. Rapunzelina, his fourth wife, was the brightness that had been missing since his sister's death, and he did not want to lose what his favorite writer, Ernesto Hemingway, ha
d called the light at the end of the world. If he and Punzy ever had a daughter, he intended to name her Luz.

Abstemio promised himself that he would quit drinking and forcing Punzy to have rough sex with him once he took her back to Mexico City, but he had a flask filled with Havana Club rum packed in his suitcase and he needed a drink. Cruz pulled over onto the side of the highway and stopped the car. He got out and opened the trunk. Just as he had unlocked the suitcase, taken out the flask, unscrewed the cap and put the tip to his lips, a Highway Patrol car pulled up behind him. Two tall, beefy patrolmen got out, both wearing reflector shades, saw him taking a swig and drew their weapons.

“Santa María!” Abstemio Cruz said to them. “Por favor, if I am going to die, let it happen in my own country.”

 

 

18

When Punzy asked Pace to accompany her to bail Abstemio Cruz out of jail in the country town of Nisbet, North Carolina, he wanted to refuse. It was almost midnight when she knocked on his door. Pace was reading
A Miracle of Catfish
, the last, unfinished novel by Larry Brown, a Mississippi writer who had died young. Brown, whom Pace had known and even gone squirrel hunting with one time, had been the kind of writer Pace would have liked to be had he the inclination and ability: surgically observant and understanding even of violent behavior absent any hint of false tenderness or rude exploitation. Locked into Larry's rural-elegant, unpanicked narrative, Pace resented Punzy's intrusion, knowing he was helpless not to acquiesce.

“What about Bitsy and Del?” he asked. “Did you tell them your husband was here? Or almost. And why is he in jail?”

Punzy was shaking and kept biting the tips of her fingers.

“They told me to leave him there,” she said. “The cops got him for bein' drunk and disorderly and drunken driving. He says it ain't true. I need five hundred dollars to get him out.”

Pace drove Punzy to Nisbet, where after some difficulty they located the jailhouse hidden behind a farm supply and feed store called Collier & Dexter's. He wrote a check for the five hundred and gave it to the night clerk, a porcine, completely hairless individual of indeterminate age wearing a pair of dark glasses missing one lens. The night clerk then ordered one of the patrolmen who'd arrested Abstemio Cruz to “Fetch your wetback.” By this time it was past three o'clock in the morning.

Pace had had to show his driver's license and sign a guarantee to deliver the prisoner on a certain date to the courthouse in Raleigh. Until then, the Mexican national would be in Pace's custody.

“I'm not thrilled about this, Punzy,” he said, while they waited for her husband to be brought out. “I hate to say it but I'm more than a little uncomfortable havin' him be my responsibility, especially if he decides to take off back to Mexico. If he bolts, I'll lose the five hundred plus another forty-five hundred they'll come after me for.”

“I know you are, Pace, honey, and I'm really sorry to drag you into this, but what else could I do?”

Punzy bit harder into her fingers, one at a time, extending her neck as if she were a deer nibbling berries off a branch.

Abstemio Cruz appeared. The guard held him firmly by his left elbow. Cruz obviously had been roughed up; there were fresh bruises on his face and he staggered forward. He kept his head lowered as the tall patrolman removed his handcuffs, and when Cruz looked up at Punzy he curled the right side of his upper lip and snarled, “It is my wish that the whole human race had one neck and I had my hands around it.”

“This un's an ornery beaner,” the highway patrolman said. “I hope you know what you're doin'.”

Rapunzlina took Cruz by one arm and walked him out of the jailhouse.

“Who are you to him?” the cop asked Pace.

“I am a pilgrim and a stranger,” Pace said, then followed Punzy and her husband into the middle of the night.

Back at the house, Bitsy was awake and more than uncommonly unhappy about the situation. She and her sister began arguing immediately. Abstemio Cruz collapsed onto a couch in the front room and fell asleep despite the women's loud voices. Del was upstairs. Pace fled the shouting and snoring and walked to his cottage, wondering why he'd allowed himself to have gotten into this mess. He was about to open the screen door when he heard a shot. Punzy came running out of Dalceda's house and threw herself into Pace's arms.

“Oh, Lord Jesus, Del shot Bitsy!” she cried. “She told him the baby wasn't his!”

There was a second shot, then another. Pace and Punzy stood frozen, holding each other. The silence that followed was louder than any noise Pace had ever heard.

Finally, he said, “Wait here.”

Pace walked slowly toward the house, knowing what he was about to see. He entered and there it was: after shooting Bitsy, Del had shot the slumbering Mexican and then himself. The three of them—four, counting Bitsy's unborn child—were dead. Pace heard a car engine start. He stepped out onto the porch in time to see Punzy speeding down the driveway in her sister's Subaru.

He sat down on the porch swing and remembered sitting there with Lula and his grandmama Marietta when he was a boy, waiting for Dalceda Delahoussaye to bring out the lemonade she made with cane sugar that he loved so much. The sky was brightening and the air was cool and moist. A fox ran across the lawn between the house and the cottage, quickly disappearing into the woods. A line of dialogue from an old black and white foreign movie popped into his head: “On this earth there is one thing that's terrible—it's that everyone has his reasons.”

Pace swung gently back and forth until the sun was almost up before he got up and went back inside to call the police.

 

 

19

Because of the extraordinary nature of the circumstances, the hamlet of Nisbet returned to Pace the five hundred dollars he'd put up for Abstemio Cruz's bond. The police would have liked to talk to Punzy, but she had disappeared; and as she was not an eyewitness to the murders, her participation in the investigation was therefore deemed non-essential. Delbert Parker was declared to be the sole perpetrator of the incident and the case was closed.

To say the least, Pace was not eager for more company. He hoped that Rapunzelina would stay away forever and he decided to not rent Dalceda's house to anyone. Pace resolved to devote his energies to writing his story of Sailor and Lula. His involvement in the tragedy with the Parkers would no doubt haunt him always, Pace knew that, and he understood that he would have to accept a certain amount of responsibility for what occurred.

Pace considered himself fortunate that Del did not shoot him, too. The only reason Del probably did not come after him was that Bitsy had not indentified Pace as the man who had impregnated her. What was it Dr. Furbo had said about how to process regret? Pace had to find the Desirable Gap, the mental state whereby he could conceivably achieve an adequate degree of solace. He needed help, but Furbo was dead, as, of course, were Sailor and Lula. The only consolation for Pace was for him to continue his quest for the Up-Down.

For weeks after the shootings, Pace was unable to concentrate on his writing, the terrible event still too fresh a wound in his mind. Then, at two o'clock on an overcast afternoon, while he was reading around in the journals of André Gide, having just finished a passage wherein Gide declares, “Dostoyevsky's greatness lies in the fact that he never reduced the world to a theory, that he never let himself be reduced by a theory, whereas Balzac constantly sought a theory of passions; it was great luck for him that he never found it,” the telephone rang in the cottage.

“Hello, Pace? It's me, Punzy. Can you talk?”

“I can, but I'm not sure I want to talk to you.”

“Pace, I'm so sorry about buggin' out like I did. It was just all so horrible I needed to get away fast.”

“Where are you?”

“Here.”

“Where's ‘here'?”

“Bay St. Clement. I'm gettin' gas at Oscarito's fillin' station. I still got Bitsy's Subaru. Poor Bitsy. Can I come see you?”

When Pace did not respond immediately, Punzy said, “Please? I won't stay if you think it's a bad idea. We need to talk, I think. I mean, I do. To explain. I miss bein' with you.”

“Okay.”

Pace thought about leaving before Punzy got there, but before he could even move she was standing in front of him.

“You cut your hair,” he said.

“Joan of Arc,” said Punzy, caressing the back of her neck with her right hand. “Do you like it?”