Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (9 page)

Danny was surprised at what the shooter was saying, talking personal stuff, perfect background information and context for
the events of two nights ago. “Minnesota sounds pretty good. I went through there once. Lots of water, clean.”

“It’s all right. When the ol’ man was off the bottle he taught me to hunt and fish. Did a lot of that. All of ’em are dead
now, my mother included.”

Danny bored in. “Ever see your father again… after he left?”

“Once. He and my mother got back together again and came down to Parris Island when I finished boot camp. Didn’t have much
to say to them… .”

The shooter let it go, his voice circling down. He lit a cigarette and watched the dry, flat countryside rolling by, the Sierra
Madre tracking along parallel to them forty miles east. A-little farther on Luz said something Danny couldn’t make out over
the wind blasting through the Bronco and the roar of a low-geared engine.

The shooter heard her. “She wants to visit the cemetery where her parents are buried. Says it’s down toward someplace called
Teacapán.”

“Ceylaya.” Luz was nearly shouting, trying to make Danny hear. “My parents are buried there. I have not visited their graves
in four years.”

“Luz, this isn’t any goddamned tour. It’s a long way to the border. Maybe we’ll stop on the way back if it works out and you
can visit all the cemeteries you want.” Danny was saying those things, knowing he wouldn’t do it, knowing he’d make up another
excuse on the way back. Sometimes you say those things anyway.

Silver-and-green Pacifico buses, big trucks, long line of them jammed up on a hill, bathing Vito in black exhaust fumes. Then
over the Río San Pedro bridge, where a huge chunk was missing from the cement railing on the right. Danny had seen those gaps
all over Mexico and always wondered for a moment who and what went over the side and never came back and how long it’d been
since they’d done it.

The shooter was looking at the road map while Danny looked over his shoulder at Luz. She was near to crying, her eyes looking
wet and infinitely black in the way they got when she was sad. Danny felt like a real shithead, but there was work to be done.
A delivery job, information gathering, lot of work. Besides, he’d never liked cemeteries of any kind. Luz sat in the jumble
where she rode, staring west out a side window of the Bronco.

The shooter folded the map. “If you take a little road out of Escuinapa and run west toward the sea, you go right past Ceylaya.”
He unbuttoned his right shirt pocket and took out three hundred dollars American, handed it to Danny. “Let her visit the cemetery,
what the hell… hour down to the coast, hour back. We’ll find someplace on the beach for lunch. All right?”

Luz was listening, watching them.

Danny felt like crap. Take the money and he’d be showing love for lucre but not really caring at all about Luz or her family’s
graves. Don’t take it and he’d piss off both her and the shooter. The shooter had put Danny in a hard place, and he didn’t
like it, made him a little scarlet in the face.

Danny turned half around and said, “We’ll go down to Ceylaya, Luz. Stop crying, for chrissake.”

He gave the money back to the shooter. “Here, it’s your trip. The money we agreed on is enough.” Greed had its limits. Not
often, but sometimes.

In Escuinapa the shooter watched a señorita cross the street in front of them while they were stopped for a light. She was
taller than most Mexican women and longer in the legs, in tight cutoff jeans and a peach top similar to a man’s sleeveless
undershirt. Under the cloth her breasts swung pleasantly back and forth as she walked. Good-looking woman, long brown hair
with copper highlights and almost Asian in her facial structure. She carried a plate of food, and the shooter watched her
until she turned in a storefront.

He looked over at Danny and grinned, little embarrassed kind of grin coming from the fact Danny had seen him watching the
woman. He shook his head a bit, as if to say “Real nice.”

Or maybe “It’s been a long time.”

Or maybe “Wish I was younger.”

As they moved along the street, the shooter turned and stared at the doorway where the señorita had disappeared. In the store
window were steel tips for spear guns, ends for outboard motor gas lines, two mouthpieces for trumpets, camera, film, masks
for scuba diving, handheld telephones, car and boat oil, flares, blank audiotapes, two flatirons, basketball, two soccer balls,
compasses, padlocks, fishing lures, swimming goggles, car headlights, clocks.

Danny turned west toward the sea while Luz was watching the shooter, who had watched the young woman in a peach top.

Six miles down the road they crossed a long bridge across some kind of backwater. A village sat on the far side of the water,
off to the right. In front of the third house along a dirt street was a cage under a banana tree, and whatever was in the
cage prowled back and forth.

The shooter saw it, too, pointing. “What’s that all about? The cage?”

“I don’t know. Mexicans keep all kinds of animals for pets.”

“Pull over. I’d like to see whatever it is up close.”

To Danny, this
was
starting to feel like a tour. But what the hell. He swung into the village and drove up the dirt street, stopping in front
of the third house.

In the cage, brown spots on buff gray fur moved behind heavy wire. An ocelot, full grown, was pacing rapidly in a space only
a little longer than its own body, barely room enough for it to turn around. And it was two short steps to one end, where
it wheeled and took two steps back to where it had started in some kind of mindless protest, the sequence repeating over and
over in an eternal journey taking it nowhere.

Danny’s stomach turned just watching it; he could sense, feel, its desperation, a kind of impotent fury or raging agony or
whatever feelings humans ascribe to animal behavior. Years before, he’d interviewed a zoologist who was on one of her tours
talking about chimpanzees. In preparation for the interview, he’d done some reading on animal behavior and found that animals
in captivity undergo change, were not the same animals they started out to be. It was bad enough in zoos, but in close quarters
such as the ocelot’s cage, they went the human equivalent of insane. Danny mentioned that, and the three of them sat there
for a minute looking at an ocelot no longer an ocelot, but something else, some creature existing nowhere else except in this
village, in this yard, in this cage under a banana tree.

“How much you think they’d sell it for?” The shooter’s eyes never left the animal.

“The cat? You thinking of buying it?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll let it go. They’re almost extinct in this part of Mexico, all over, I guess. Read that in a magazine a while back.”

Jesús-on-the-dashboard, talk about nutty stuff, talk about crazy. Danny could see it all: him driving, Luz sitting on an assassin’s
lap, while three inches behind the driver was an insane ocelot, and all of them heading toward a cemetery Danny didn’t want
to visit in the first place.

Still, he understood the shooter’s point. “Probably want thousands of dollars for it. Five, ten thousand, I really don’t know.
Not only do zoos love ’em, but fancy ladies covet ocelot coats.”

“I don’t have that much extra money with me. How long does it take to get money down here by wire?”

“Hard to say. Two days, a week, maybe, for the kind of money you’re talking about. Start transferring that much and everybody
gets interested, including the DEA in the United States. They all figure you’re dealing dope.”

The shooter lay back in his seat, face clenched and hard. “Let’s roll.”

“It’s a tough world,” Danny said, shifting gears, getting back up on the pavement. “Ever been to a bullfight? That’s something
else all over again, a ceremony about death, about the control of man over an animal.”

“No. I refuse to go.” The shooter was still looking straight ahead, lips almost closed while he talked. “But it gets worse
than bullfights. Ever hear of the sanguinary
fiestas populares?
Translates as ’bloody festivals.’ Have them in Spain all the time. I saw one once. Couldn’t believe it.”

“Can’t say I have.”

“There’re different versions of it, depending on the place and the fiesta in progress. One version, one they like in Coria,
is where a bull is set free in a street. People try to put out its eyes with steel-tipped darts, the literal version of a
bull’s-eye. Clever, huh? After a while the bull is full of darts, stuck in him every which way and all over and staggering
around.

“Then the crowd starts torturing him, beating on him and pulling his tail and stabbing him with metal spikes that have barbs
on them. Finally the bull is killed and castrated. When that’s done, the fun seekers—and we’re talking men,

women,
and
children—smear themselves with its blood. The climax is parading the poor sonuvabitch’s testicles around town as part of
the celebration. Other versions involve dwarves or clowns mocking the real bullfights by using calves. It’s torture, pure
and simple. I like most Spanish and Mexican people I meet, but I’ve never understood the way some of them treat animals, particularly
when all of that shit is done under the heading of religion, which it often is. Hell, in Spain even the local priests come
out to bless the affair. Maybe they do here, for all I know.”

“Well, we hang ’em up and slit their throats in packing houses,” Danny said. “Hunt ’em down with high-power rifles. See any
difference?”

“I see a big difference, but I don’t much like that, either. Hunted animals when I was a kid, don’t anymore. Got this notion
of parallel civilizations in my head. Has to do with the equality of living things… all things… rocks and trees and ocelots
and bulls and humans, learning to love the snake as much as you love the butterfly. Not sure when I started thinking like
that.”

He paused, looking out the side window. “Ah, to hell with it all.”

Danny felt like mentioning the dogfights and cockfights and animal mutilations that still went on in the States, but he could
see the shooter was in a nasty mood and left him alone with his contradictions.

On the edge of Ceylaya, the shooter and Danny sat in the Bronco while Luz walked up a long hill to the cemetery. Flies everywhere
and hot wind and a young boy driving a herd of cattle past them along the road. They swatted flies while the shooter watched
Luz through the heat waves. After a while, saying nothing, he got out and followed her.

In central Mexico’s hottest time of the year, the sun was a laser and beat upon him as he climbed the hill. Danny watched
him tug a bandanna from his right hip pocket, wiping his face and neck while he walked.

Luz was kneeling in the middle of the little graveyard. The shooter walked over to her and stood quietly, noticing how her
hair clung to the back of her neck and how her brown skin shone from sweat and sunlight. After a minute or two, she rose,
and Danny could see her saying something to him. The shooter nodded and they talked, at first not smiling, then smiling a
little as they came slowly down toward the Bronco.

When they were twenty yards out, Luz stopped and gathered a handful of flowers, asking the shooter to hold them while she
got settled in Vito. He looked slightly uncomfortable clutching flowers, and when he handed them back to Luz, one fell from
his hands and blew into the ditch on a gust of morning wind. Luz said never mind, but he retrieved the single yellow flower
and held it out to her. As Danny started the engine and headed toward the beach, Luz was bending toward the flowers and smelling
them. The shooter watched the road ahead, and smiled.

By the number of Tecate bottles on the table in front of them, Danny guessed the hombres in the Teacapán beach restaurant
had been drinking beer for a couple of hours, since late morning, maybe. The men had pulled a Dodge pickup close to where
they were sitting and had the doors swung open with the truck radio pounding like the heat itself. The hood on the truck was
raised, and one of them had apparently been working on it, judging by the oil and grease on his light cotton shirt. Danny
could smell gasoline and concluded that he’d been fiddling with the carburetor.

There were eight of them, drinking and sweating under the thatched roof, laughing too loudly for whatever the occasion might
be, fingering their machetes lying on the table. One of them set a beer bottle on the blade of his machete and flipped the
bottle end over end into the air, trying to catch it on the blade when it fell. The reach of his intent far exceeded his skill,
and the bottle broke on the tabletop. His compadres laughed.

Luz whispered the Mexican word for drunks—
“borrachos.”

The juggler looked over at Danny, Luz, and the shooter, mean little sneer on his face. The song blasting from the truck radio
had something to do with
nortearnericanos,
something about what rich, sloppy jerks they were and how poorly they treated the migrant laborers stooped low in the fields
of their truck farms. Danny picked up that much.