Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (22 page)

The band had arrived in a green Volkswagen Beetle. How they’d stuffed two guitars, a trumpet, an accordion, and a stand-up
bass in there, along with five people, wasn’t clear. But they’d done it, and they were here, the music filling
el centro
and the night.

Hombres in straw cowboy boots and clean shirts paraded around, beers in hand. The señoritas sat in small groups on the far
side of the concrete floor, a few of them almost as pretty as Luz and ready to drive men to their knees in prayer just from
the looking at them and the contemplating all that is possible with a woman on a night like this. Little boys in white shirts
and black pants ran and slid on the dance floor. So did little girls in white dresses and white shoes. The dancing was slow
to get started, reminding Danny of the old high school affairs back in Kansas, where the girls sat along one wall waiting
for the heroes to whip up enough nerve to ask them to dance.

By about nine-thirty a few couples were moving around the floor and others were looking as if they might. Danny asked Luz
if she’d like to give it a try. They slid into the music, dancing nice and easy to a slow waltz, trumpet and accordion playing
fine old Mexican harmonies. Luz smelled like all the flowers that had ever followed rain and felt good in his arms, and instantly
he wanted to haul her off to bed. He wanted her at that moment more than he’d ever wanted her, wanted her panting and naked,
to bend her like grass in a summer wind and pull her back toward him from wherever she seemed to be going. He brought her
in close and told her what he was thinking. As the song declined, she smiled with her mouth and her eyes in a way hinting
everything was possible and forthcoming.

They danced a fast number, one of those Mexican polkas whose rhythms eluded Danny, but Luz laughed and took the lead, pulling
him around the floor and getting it done. Danny was sweating, yet Luz still seemed as cool as she’d looked on the cantina
porch. They walked over to where the shooter was leaning against the wall. As they approached him, he smiled and applauded
quietly.

“Very nice,” he said.

Danny veered off toward a little stand on the far side of the dance floor. Walking past the señoritas sitting in a row, he
grinned at them, and they giggled when he said,
“Buenas noches, senoritas.”
The hombres near the beer stand didn’t giggle when he greeted them, but they didn’t seem all that unfriendly, either, saying,
“Buenas noches,”
back to him and tugging on their Pacificos. While Danny waited at the concession stand, he could hear one of them saying
something about “two gringos, one woman.” The others laughed, their imaginations working images of what two gringos and one
woman might bring about later on in the village darkness.

The band took a break. Luz, Danny, and the shooter stood near the south wall of
el centro,
not saying much, enjoying the laughter and swirl of people. The village priest came in and greeted everyone. That quieted
things down, beers sheepishly hid behind pant legs. When
el padrecito
left after making his rounds, things picked up again. Danny watched him go and watched the bottles of Pacifico reappear,
and he thought about how lovable hypocrisy could be sometimes; it had such a human quality.

There came a moment when Danny genuinely felt sorry for the shooter, the only time he would ever truly feel that way about
him. Danny and Luz had danced again, then walked back to where Clayton Price was still leaning against the concrete wall.
She held out her arms to him, indicating she was willing to dance with him. He shook his head and smiled timidly.

She coaxed, and he finally said, almost in a whisper, “I’ve never danced.”

Danny stared at him. “C’mon, not ever? Somewhere, sometime, you must have danced?”

“No. Not ever. That’s the truth.”

Strange, how very goddamned strange. In a world full of people dancing, here was a man in his fifties who’d never held a woman
in his arms while music played. He was, indeed, a creature even more rare than Danny had imagined. Danny wasn’t all that good
on a dance floor, but he’d spent a lot of nights doing it. A little beer, a little music, holding a woman close, good things
to come along afterward.

Clayton Price looked down at his dusty shoes. “It’s just I’ve never been anyplace where it all worked out… you know, music
and somebody to dance with. I haven’t spent my life in those kinds of places.” He looked up, implacability shed for a moment,
as if he were asking—one time and this one time only—for a moment of understanding about where and how he’d gone, of all the
things he’d never been. Of all the things he’d never had, white porch swings on Kansas summer nights and the voice of a girl
on her way to becoming a woman, telling you about her dreams and the new sweater she’d bought for the cold nights ahead.

And Danny thought back to the fraternity brawls in Columbia, Missouri, where he’d twisted the night away with Missy Morganthal
to the repetitious beat of Chubby Checker and Bo Diddley. Somewhere around that time, Clayton Price would have been lying
thousands of miles to the west, in warm jungle rain, ants crawling up his legs and mosquitoes drawing blood from his face,
his hands touching the wood and steel of a deathstick. Clayton Price going into his bubble while Danny was playing grab-ass
with a mostly drunk coed named Missy. One night Missy had stripped down to nothing and had done a wild version of the twist
while her sorority sisters had rolled their eyes and Danny’s fraternity brothers had gone into a tribal thump, urging her
on to greater heights and screaming like men with stone hatchets and wars to fight.

At that moment, half a world away, the shooter might have been watching a woman not much older than Missy through his Redfield
scope, watching her squat down to pee just before he blew her head apart at seven hundred yards when the fog lifted. Christ,
no wonder Clayton Price had never learned to dance. And Danny Pastor felt sorry for the thin man, while simultaneously feeling
guilty again for reasons not altogether clear to him.

“I will teach you to dance, don’t be afraid.” Luz was looking up at the shooter, soft little smile on her face. She was speaking
so quietly Danny could barely hear her. “We will wait for a slow song.”

If it were left to women such as Luz, we’d be a better species. Danny started reflecting on that certainty. Here was a man,
Clayton Price, who seemed oblivious of committing the most violent acts possible, who probably had never loved with any duration
or intensity, and who was brought low now merely by the thought of moving around to music with a woman in his arms. And Luz
María standing there, willing to tackle the problem in a soft, loving way. Ready to teach the boy a little more about being
a man, something that had to be done gradually, in the way women know how to do it. If men let them.

A fast song, then another one of those slow waltzes the Mexicans played so well, accordion taking the lead. The night was
warm and humid. Clayton Price had sweat beading up on his forehead and throat, from the heat… maybe… more likely from the
fear of dancing.

Without being obvious about it, Luz took him along the concrete to an area of the floor where it was quiet and the hombres
couldn’t see them very well. Underneath magenta bougainvillea hanging over the wall, she put her left hand on his shoulder,
placed his right hand behind her waist, and took his left hand in her right. They moved slowly, out of time to the music at
first, then gradually onto the beat.

The shooter was clumsy but stayed with it, embarrassed and yet giving it a try. His long legs were stiff and unsure, his desert
boots shuffled around in unusual ways, but Luz persisted and somehow it sort of worked. It worked because of Luz and because
the shooter cared for her in ways he didn’t really understand, because he had come somewhere along the way to want music and
softness and didn’t know how or where to look for it until he’d met Luz. Whatever happened out ahead, Danny thought, Clayton
Price could say he’d danced one warm night in the Sierra Madre with a woman who wore a pale orange hibiscus in her black hair.
Danny couldn’t help smiling, and it was odd, real odd, but he had tears in his eyes as he watched them.

The song ended, and they walked back toward Danny. Luz was smiling; so was the shooter smiling in a shy fashion. He lit a
cigarette and leaned against the wall where he’d been leaning before and couldn’t get that little smile off his face, just
kept it there as if it were involuntary. He was holding on to the moment, pressing it like a flower into his memory.

Luz and the shooter danced a few more times, always to slow songs. Danny looked over the lineup of señoritas who didn’t seem
to be attached to anyone and asked one of them to dance. She was wearing a red print dress and heavy-looking black high heels,
her hair gathered in the back with a metal clasp. Her friends giggled, and she looked at them, slightly flustered but pleased
the aging gringo had asked her, taking Danny’s hand when he held it out. She had a thin line of perspiration along her upper
lip and smelled warm and honest, like the earth itself after the sun had beat upon it for a long summer day.

She was called Nacha and spoke no English. But she and Danny got around the floor just fine. He took her back after two songs,
thanked her, and asked another señorita who was sitting next to her. Eventually he worked his way down the line—the thin ones
and heavy ones, pretty and otherwise—and, given he didn’t know when or if ever he might dance again, there was something especially
good and true about dancing with a row of señoritas on a warm May evening in the middle of his life.

D
anny, Luz, and the shooter left the dance shortly after midnight when things were starting to heat up a bit. Two of the hombres
had begun pushing each other around over in one corner of the floor a few minutes earlier, and it was time to go. They walked
along the cobblestones toward their rooms, stopped for a moment, and looked at a quarter moon rocking in the southwest, out
across the foothills of the Sierra Madre. Luz was humming a tune the band had played, and Danny was sure it was the song to
which she and Clayton Price had first danced.

But the dancing wasn’t finished. They passed an open doorway, and inside a woman held a baby high in the light of a bare,
single bulb, singing to the baby as she moved slowly around a small room in waltz time. Around the room she danced and the
baby in its white nightshirt smiling down at the woman’s face and gurgling with pleasure. Danny looked at the shooter who
was looking at Luz who was smiling. All of them felt as if they were spying on something so private it belonged only to the
woman and the baby, and they walked on. They’d seen some old, old dance neither Danny Pastor nor Clayton Price understood
very well. But women understand that kind of thing; Luz understood, and Danny hurt for her, guessing she was remembering a
hot July day in Puerto Vallarta when she’d done something she hadn’t wanted to do because he’d insisted, and he’d bought her
a Panasonic tape player afterward. And he was sorry for that, too. Over the last few days, Danny Pastor had started to feel
sorry about a lot of things.

Danny was tired, but the shooter and Luz seemed reluctant to let the evening close. Eventually, though, they went to their
separate rooms, where Danny and Luz made love. It was good, as always, but there was something a little distant about her,
as if she were someplace else even while she pressed her belly against his.

He awakened when full dawn was somewhere east of the mountains, silence and a night world outside. Luz was gone. She came
in a few minutes later, naked and walking soft, lying down beside Danny, who said nothing and feigned sleep. She lay there
softly humming the same tune she’d been humming a few hours earlier. And something in the sound of her told Danny she was
smiling.

Danny slept again, an hour maybe, coming awake when he heard loud and urgent knocking on their door.

“”Yes, yes, hold on,” yanking up his jeans.

Clayton Price, standing there with first light coming up behind him. The roosters and donkeys were in full chorus, and dogs
were fighting somewhere down the street, sounding like wolves as they tore at one another.

“Get up and get ready to move,” the shooter said. “Right now.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t know. Something’s not right, got bad feelings in my gut. I’m going to look around. I’ll be back in five minutes. Be
ready when I get here.”

Danny shook Luz into consciousness. When the shooter returned, they were dressed, scratchy with sleep but waking up fast.
Luz sat on the bed, Danny leaned on the wash-stand, feeling the bulge of the twenty-five hundred dollars he’d taken out of
its sleeping-bag hiding place and stuffed in the left front pocket of his jeans. The shooter closed the door and stood there
in his jeans, denim shirt, and photographer’s vest. On the wall behind and above his head a small gecko lizard glued itself
to the adobe, tail toward the ceiling and silent and still, waiting for something of worth to pass its way.

“I made a phone call last night. Went down and got the shopkeeper out of bed, said it was an emergency. I called a guy in
Monterrey.” He nodded toward Danny. “Called him the other day while you were in Mazatlán and made some preliminary arrangements.
He’s an old friend of mine from the military, high placed now in the U.S. diplomatic service. I saved his ass in the jungle
one time and he owes me. I asked him about this whole situation. He told me because I hit the naval officer in Puerto Vallarta,
word is out that I’m a loose cannon, no longer to be trusted, and that I might be in the process of settling old scores all
over the place. That’s why you saw the official-looking gringos in Concordia. They’re real bad guys, CIA or worse. My Monterrey
contact says everybody’s after us—after me, at least. I didn’t say anything about the two of you. On the other hand, there’s
plenty of people who’ve seen the three of us together over the last few days. In any case, this is starting to look like Cortes’s
march out of Tenochtitlan.”