Gringos (3 page)

The leader was a big fellow with dirt necklaces in the fleshy creases of his neck, a fat man in his forties, with curly black beard, silver earrings, a fringed black vest with no shirt underneath, a rotting blue bandana on his head, and loose white
campesino
trousers. They were cinched up with a rope like pajamas, and the bottoms were stuffed into green canvas jungle boots. Big Dan looked like a wrestling act, beef gone to fat, but with his costume not quite worked out. It wasn't all of a piece yet. Maybe an old biker. Almost certainly an ex-convict. I could see the letters AB—for Aryan Brotherhood—tattooed under his left breast. It was a rough, homemade job done with a pin and spit and burnt match-heads.

He grinned at me, coming forward with a knobby walking stick, taking golf chops at cans and clods. The others hung back. The two boys were much younger than Dan. A pair of cueballs, these fellows, with shaved heads and vacant eyes. Much better than long hair. No hair at all meant you were at a more advanced stage of revolt. One of the girls, or a tall woman rather with lank brown hair, squatted where she stood and lifted her skirt and took a long noisy leak right there on the ground in front of everybody.

Dan called me Curtis. He said, “Merry Christmas to you, Curtis.”

“You too.”

“And
mucho
happiness for the new year.”

The girls laughed. I had seen one of them before, and not, I thought, in connection with this crew. She was a little rabbit they called Red, standing about barefooted on the hot sand. She looked like a Dust Bowl child, a bony waif in a thin cotton dress that hung straight down to her knees. I had seen that face before but couldn't place it.

Dan said, “Well, did you get it fixed?”

“Just about.”

“Curtis says he's just about got his truck fixed. What a relief that must be.”

The girls laughed again.

“Hey, pal, just having a little fun. My name is Dan. These are my friends. We're The Jumping Jacks and we come from the Gulf of Molo.”

“Where is that?”

“It's beyond your understanding, I'm afraid.”

“Then why tell me at all?”

“Hey, don't come back at me so fast. We're getting off on the wrong foot here. I was hoping you might be able to help us. We lost all our things. We rely on charity, you see, for our daily needs.”

“You came to a poor country to do your begging.”

“Not just to beg.”

The others chimed in.

“We came down here to clarify our thoughts.”

“We have found the correct path.”

“Big Dan, he is a lot of man. He is one set apart.”

“We have fled the madness and found the gladness.”

“People call us trash and throw turnips at us.”

“Dan is more than our father.”

“We're on our way to the Inaccessible City of Dawn.”

“But
El Mago
didn't show up.”

Dan spoke sharply to them. “Hey, none of that now. Didn't I tell you about that? Not another word on that.” He turned back to me. “I can see you are not a person of wide sympathy, Curtis. Nothing escapes me. I can see right into your soul. Would you believe we have now made twenty-four enemies in the north and twenty-four enemies in the south? No lie. You are exactly the twenty-fourth person in Mexico to find us loathsome and undesirable.”

“I would believe fifty-four, Dan.”

“Hey! Would you listen to this guy! He keeps coming right back at me!”

He jabbered away, and I went on with my work, opening cans of oil. There was a rustling in the thicket. It was a browsing goat, a billy goat, shouldering his way through the brush. His coat was the color of wet sand.

Dan became agitated. “A goat! After him! An unblemished ram! Get the goat!”

The two boys went crashing into the thicket.

“You too, Red! Go, go! I want that animal! Get him! His name is Azazel! He's carrying off all the sins of the people! I must lay my hands on him and say some words!”

“And cut his throat!” said the tall woman.

Red dashed off to help. The other two girls took up the cry, facing each other and going into a hand-slapping game. “Get that goat and cut his throat! Get that goat and cut his throat! What does Dan say? Dan says get the goat. What does Beany say? Beany says cut his throat. . . .”

I finished with the oil and slammed the hood down. I had lost sight of Dan. He had wandered around to the back of the truck and was poking about inside with his stick. When I got there he was pulling the top off a can of my vienna sausages.

He raised the can to me and said, “Your good health,” and drank off the juice. “Soup of the day. Do you have any bread?”

“No.”

“I can eat these things plain but let me tell you—say, you didn't take us for vegetarians, did you? Wandering herbivores?”

“I hadn't thought about it.”

“People get us all wrong. We gladly eat the flesh of animals. When we can get it. Why would God give us sharp teeth if not to rend and tear things with? Let me tell you how I usually go about this. There are seven of these little men to a can. I take three slices of bread and make three foldover sandwiches, with two sausages to each piece of bread, don't you see. Then I take the seventh one, the odd man, and just pop it into my mouth naked, like a grape. I've done it that way for years, and now you tell me you don't have no bread.”

I said nothing. He shrugged and ate the sausages. “Do you have anything else to spare? I mean like sardines or beer or shoes or Mexico rum? Just anything in that line. I like your sleeping bag, all rolled up nice and tight like that. Your plastic lantern, too. I'll bet that thing comes in handy. Does it float or blink or have some special features I should know about? We could use a good light. The nights are long and we stumble in darkness. Maybe we could look through your stuff and just pick out what we want. I know you must set great store by all these material possessions but look here, my friend, it's the season for giving and you have so much.”

More laughter from the girls. The tall woman said, “Or maybe he could just lend us a million pesos till payday.”

“That's not a bad idea, Beany Girl. It works out well for him too. We get
mucho dinero
for our pressing needs, and he gets to keep all his much-prized possessions. But I don't know about this guy. You might think he would say,
‘See see, Seenyore
, your house is my house and my house is your house,' but no, not this guy. Ask Curtis for bread and he don't even give you a stone.”

His jocular manner had a dark edge to it that was meant to be unsettling, but it was a transparent act, a bit of old movie business, not well done. The two boys and little Red came back with no goat. A child can hem up a goat, but these three couldn't catch a goat. They talked about it. Beany Girl said that they hadn't really tried. There was a silence. Then, on what must have been a signal from Dan, all of them picked up rocks and looked at me. They stood perfectly still with their mouths gaping. They were a clan of early hunters in a museum diorama. And the rocks were big, not missiles but clubs.

I was wiping my hands on a rag and moving to the cab. I said, “Well, I guess I can spare a few beers. I keep some cans of Modelo in a cooler behind the seat here.” I had rigged up a shallow storage compartment back there, really just a raised and squared-off cover made of sheet metal. It ran the width of the cab and appeared to be a structural part of the floor. I kept my double-barrel shotgun there, an ancient L. C. Smith 12-gauge with exposed hammers and double triggers. I had bought it from a hunting guide called Chombo. It was about sixty years old, and long too. I had sawed two inches off the barrels and the thing still looked like a goose gun.

I pulled it out and cocked both hammers and walked over to Dan and touched the muzzle lightly to his belly at the parting of his vest. His flesh jumped in a little spasm from the hot metal.

“No, I guess not. No beer today, Dan. This was all I could find.”

“No need to get heavy, man. Have we offended you in some way?”

“Heavee,”
said Beany Girl.

I asked for some identification. Dan said he had none, that he never carried anything on his person.

“Maybe you ought to start. Where are your tourist papers?”

“Gone. Stolen. We got ripped off bad at the beach last night. We were supposed to meet someone at Progreso but he didn't show up. We had all our stuff in plastic bags. That's what we're doing here, man. I thought we could find some useful things here at the dump but this is the worst looking trash I ever saw.”

I took his stick and pointed to a spot. “I want all of you to drop the rocks and sit on the ground, right there, back to back. No, better not say anything. Just do it.”

Beany Girl had more spirit than Dan and she held back. She was just a little slow to comply, and I had to whack her across the neck with the knobby stick. The blow came as a surprise. It stung and was effective. She was lucky I didn't knock her brains out. A grown woman, squatting down like that in front of everybody. There was no
mingitorio
out here, naturally, but any decent woman would have gone behind a bush. Dan was picking and pulling at his beard. I had to pop him one, too, on the arm. “Get your hand down and keep it down. Nobody talks and nobody moves a finger unless I say so. You got that?”

When I had them all seated and arranged to suit me, I searched the car. There were no papers. I walked around the car breaking glass, punching at the cracked places with the stick. I smashed the headlights too. Then I propped one end of the stick against a wheel and broke it with my foot and flung the pieces away. Dan took that hardest of all. “My staff,” he said. I raised the hood and ripped out all of the spark plug wires.

Something moved in the brush. I thought one of the hippies had slipped away. Even at rest these Jumping Jacks were hard to count. I wouldn't let them talk but I think they must have set up a high frequency hum to interfere with my head. When I reached the fourth or fifth one in my tally I became confused and had to start over again. But no, it was only the goat. He had come back, a curious fellow, bearing the load of sins well. He munched on a mouthful of briars and watched us with sleepy eyes.

I climbed into the truck with my shotgun and my handful of cables. Three of them were Packard-Delco wires that didn't belong on a Ford. I started the engine and almost at once the oil pressure needle moved. The pump had picked up the oil.

Dan said, “You got us wrong, man. No need for all this. You're not following the correct path.”

Blood was roaring in my ears. I had to get away from these people before I did something. I could hardly trust myself to speak. “Don't let me catch you around this truck again,” I said.

I still wasn't thinking straight. You let people annoy you and you forget your own best interests. It wasn't until late afternoon that I thought about checking to see if Dan were listed on one of Gilbert's Blue Sheets. I had missed a bet there. Gilbert ran a location service, nominally in El Paso but really out of an office in Mexico City, where these Blue Sheets come from, giving a rundown on Americans thought to be hiding in Mexico. I did a little work for him now and then, when I felt like it, just enough these days to get the monthly bulletins, blue paper stamped all over in red, CONFIDENTIAL, and AGENCY USE ONLY, and NOT FOR CIRCULATION IN U.S., and ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, GILBERT MOSS. Locate one of these fugitives for Gilbert and you were paid 40 percent of the posted fee. Bring the bird in yourself and you got 75 percent. Mostly they were runaway kids, alimony dodgers and the like, bond jumpers with a few tax evaders and swindlers and embezzlers, victims of surprise audits, and a very few violent criminals, but only those with substantial rewards on their heads. Gilbert was running a business and not a justice agency. The violent ones gave too much trouble.

I got my stack of Blue Sheets out of the closet and sat on the bed and went through them, starting with the latest ones. Dan may have been in there somewhere, but I lost interest in him when I came across a photograph of Little Red. I knew I had seen that face. Her name was LaJoye Mishell Teeter and she was from Perry, Florida. A runaway. The picture was a poor one, poorly Xeroxed from a poor reproduction of the missing persons column in
The War Cry
, the Salvation Army magazine. But there was no mistaking that rabbit face. The offered fee was $2,000, which meant $1,500 for me if and when I delivered her.

No time to lose. Back to the dump. I would bring Dan in and get the Judicial Police here, the federal police, to hold him on a turpitude charge, if not for kidnapping, while I checked him out with Gilbert by telephone. The girl was clearly under age.

I was too late. The Jumping Jacks were gone in their Country Squire wagon, shattered windshield and all. They were resourceful, I had to admit that. The two cueballs must have stolen some more plug wires, eight of them this time, plus a coil wire, and maybe a couple of headlights too, or they would truly be stumbling in darkness tonight. Dan had mentioned the beach. I drove to Progreso and cruised up and down the beachfront. Nothing doing. I should have burned that car up while I was at it.

ONE NIGHT in Shreveport I overhead a man trying to pick up a waitress in a bar. She asked him what he did for a living. He hesitated, then said, “I work out of my car.” I thought he would have done better to lie, or even to confess to whatever it was he did out of his car, however awful, rather than to say that. I smiled over my drink in my superior way.

Now here I was years later, working out of my car, not smiling so much, and at a loss to say just what it was I did, out of my car. My truck rather. Light hauling, odd jobs. No more digging runs. I missed them too and I didn't think I would.