Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (21 page)

Then he grinned again and spoke to Danny, “Your amigo is indeed lucky to have such a pretty woman to dance with. “Yes, the
señoritas will dance with you if you ask politely, and they will be pleased you asked. A word of warning, though: Plan to
leave the fiesta around midnight. By that time there is much beer in the bellies that muddies the minds.” He flipped his head
toward the hombres in back of him. “And it makes them reach for knives or beer bottles when they have an argument. If things
get foolish, they surely will blame any problems on the gringos who were dancing with village women, and then you will have
trouble.”

“Muchas gracias,”
Danny said. “We’ll be careful.”

“Yes, be careful, amigo.” The cop looked at Luz María in her yellow dress. “That is a very pretty dress, seiiorita. Sefior,
you are very lucky to have such a pretty woman in a pretty dress who cares about you.” The shooter grinned back, nodding vigorously.

“We are engaged to be married,” Luz said without missing a beat, and tucked her arm in the shooter’s. Danny was starting to
wonder about that very thing himself.

The cops rolled down the street, talking with one another. Where the plaza ended, the driver looked back at them over his
shoulder, then made a corner and headed out of the village toward the Durango road.

“What do you think?” Danny asked the shooter.

“Don’t know. Things are always what they are and never what they seem; there’s always a lot of smoke and swirl in these situations.
We’ll go to the fiesta tonight, pull out in the morning. Maybe take the road to Ponuco we were on this afternoon and try to
work our way north through the mountains. Is that possible?”

“It might be possible if we strap on the supplementary gas cans and if you want to take about three years to get to the border.”

“If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. We’ll consider that plan C. I’ll pay you extra, of course.”

Danny wasn’t worried about money at the moment. He was worried about the forces of light roaming around the state of Sinaloa,
like beaters moving through a forest. He was worried that the thin, hard face of Clayton Price might have been staring out
of some photograph along the road in Concordia while cops passed it from hand to hand and committed it to memory before driving
through the nearby villages on a festival day in 1993. Then he got to thinking the shooter had said “plan C.”

“If that’s plan C, maybe you’d like to share plans A and B with me?”

“Plan B is a straight run up the main roads, take our chances. I’m still thinking about plan A. I’ll let you know when I get
it worked out.” He went inside and came back with a margarita for Luz and two beers for him and Danny.

Luz poked Danny’s arm. “I washed your shirt, Danny. Pants, too, so you will look nice for the fiesta. I hang them in window
to dry. Such two handsome hombres—the señoritas will be chasing both of you, and I will be jealous.”

There was a curious lilt in her voice Danny had never heard before, something to do with getting a fix on things and knowing
who you are and where you’re going. At least she was still doing the laundry.

While Luz was up in the room getting herself ready, the shooter told Danny how he’d felt about hearing the rosary being said
at twilight. It was the most thoughtful Danny had ever seen him.

He suggested they visit a man named Ian who lived up the hill back of where they were staying. The shooter had reconnoitered
the village on Saturday morning. Outside of a house he’d seen a sign proclaiming Ian Somebody lived within and had published
a book called
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” Continued.
The shooter said B. Traven’s original book was one of his favorites, the quintessential portrait of greed and treachery,
but he’d never heard about any sequel and wanted to see what this guy Ian was up to. After a field trip in the afternoon,
Danny was thinking, they were now into the archaeology of Sierra Madrean literature.

The visit to Ian’s turned out to be interesting in the old macabre sense, in the way the Chinese curse you by saying “May
you live in interesting times.” Ian had cancer of the face, a common problem for fair-skinned gringos who don’t wear wide-brimmed
hats while wandering around in the Mexican sun. And Ian’s case was a bad one, the front half of his nose missing along with
other nasty mutilations. But he was glad to see them. In fact, he was elated they’d dropped by and brought out two more glasses
so they could share the tequila he’d been working on for some time. Both Danny and the shooter said they’d pass on the tequila,
but Ian poured their glasses full anyway. It’s hard to drink alone all the time.

Danny couldn’t help staring at Ian’s face, couldn’t get by that at first. Pretty rough, especially where you could see right
up his nose. He tried to distract himself by looking around Ian’s digs, but it was hard not to stare at the man’s face. After
a minute or two of that incivility, Danny knocked back his tequila in one shot, let it take hold, and started to feel better.
In ten minutes or so he was able to stop looking at the holes in Ian’s face, avoid the aqueous eyes, and concentrate on what
he was saying.

Ian had done a lot of things in his time. Evidently he’d made some real money in Texas land development and plowed the profits
into a huge mining venture with the Mexican government as his partner. Said he’d wandered all over central Mexico in a Chevy
Blazer, looking for silver. It’d all gone to hell, and Ian had lost everything, including his face and his wife, who’d died
of diabetes several years back. He seemed jovial enough, but Danny could sense the laughter was a shallow and transparent
mask for the sorrows of his losses—his face, his wife, his money.

Though something about it didn’t ring true to Danny, Ian claimed his Christian name meant “God is gracious” and repeated over
and over, “Cant complain… Christ, I’ve had a good life.” He’d say that, then would take another hit of tequila and complain
some more, and later on would come back to saying his life had been a good life.

Indeed he’d written a sequel to
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
and had sent it to a New York literary shark who claimed to be an agent and who’d agreed to read the manuscript for a fee
of $700. The agent had written back, saying Ian gave evidence of real literary talent, but the book wasn’t publishable in
its present form, probably wasn’t fixable, and that Ian ought to set it aside and start on another writing project. The agent
would be happy to read anything else Ian wrote, for another $700 or so. But Ian was broke; he didn’t have $700, he didn’t
even have another manuscript or an idea for one. Danny could empathize with him.

The shooter mentioned that Danny was a writer. That got Ian’s attention, and he spoke excitedly: “What have you written? Anything
I might’ve heard of?”

Danny didn’t want to get into a discussion of the writing business, since he knew the next thing Ian would want was the name
and phone number of Danny’s literary agent. Martha already had manuscripts, dozens and maybe hundreds, from Ians all over
the world who wanted to get published. The manuscripts lay neatly stacked in a corner of her office, waiting to be taken to
the incinerator, unread.

Danny looked at his watch and said it was about time to collect Luz and get on to the dance.

“Wait a minute!” Ian pleaded, wailing almost, and pouring Danny another shot of tequila. “Tell me what you’ve written.”

“Not too much, a few things here and there. Nothing anybody’s ever heard of.”

Danny started feeling pinched and claustrophobic and wanted out of there, wanted music and lights, wanted to dance with Luz
María and feel her body against him. He stood up as Ian started rambling on about a computer he’d bought from some off-the-wall
outfit ten years before. The machine used diskettes of a size nobody made anymore. He had all sixty of his diskettes filled,
and did they know where he could get any more? They didn’t, and Danny started walking down the stairs from Ian’s place, feeling
not at all festive with the fiesta getting under way.

The shooter paused at the stair top. “Ian, if we wanted to take a real scenic route up to the border, wander through Mexico
on back roads, is there any way we could do it?”

Suspicions confirmed. Danny’d had a feeling the shooter was interested in Ian for something other than literary purposes.
Ian said they should come back and sit down, have some more tequila, and he’d tell them what he knew about the Mexican outback,
and he knew a lot. Besides, an hombre called Gustavo was coming by in a while to play dominoes and they could ask him about
scenic routes, too.

Ian slugged down a double, or maybe triple, shot of tequila and was starting to look a little crazylike, so both Danny and
the shooter begged off, mentioning Luz was waiting for them. On their way down the stairs, Ian said pretty much the same thing
Danny had told the shooter. It was possible to get just about anywhere in Mexico, using back roads, particularly if you had
four-wheel drive. But you had to know what you were doing, and if you didn’t, you’d end up out of gas and out of water and
out of time, not having the slightest idea of where to get any of those.

He flailed about with his arms. “You can die out there, every bad thing you can think of: snakes, scorpions, sun.” He swept
his hand in a wide arc of almost three hundred sixty degrees. “Mexico’s a sonuvabitch in the outback. Matter of fact, it’s
a sonuvabitch anywhere, doesn’t cut you any slack at all. Look what it’s done to me.”

So much for plan C. That left them with taking the main highways or sailing along on the shooter’s still secret plan A. Danny
could hear music and see colored lights hanging across a cement dance floor down the hillside from Ian’s. It was time to party,
maybe for the last time, at least for a while.

As Danny and the shooter opened the gate to Ian’s place and headed down the path to the cantina, Ian called after them, “Hey,
stop back tomorrow, talk some more. Remember the great adversary of art or anything else is a hurried life. As they used to
teach us in World War Two, the eight enemies of survival are fear, pain, cold, thirst, hunger, fatigue, boredom, and loneliness.
Haste is the ninth.”

“You’re sure, now. It was him?” Walter McGrane had taken a four-hour nap in the afternoon and was feeling better, alert and
wanting to get the job done and get the goddamn hell out of Mexico and back to civilization. He spoke sharply to the policeman
before him, smelling chiles when the man burped.

“Señor, it was him, I’m sure. He sat there on the cantina porch.”

The other policeman was shaking his head up and down in spirited confirmation of what his partner was saying.

“And there was a man and a woman with him?”

“Sí”

“And the woman was a Mexican, and pretty?”

“Oh, yes, señor. Very pretty.” With his hands, he carved the shape of a svelte woman in the air and grinned.

“What did the other man look like?”

The policeman shrugged and held out his palms. “He looked like any other gringo.
Norteamericano,
I think.”

Walter McGrane turned to the windbreakered men behind him. “Get saddled up. We 11 go in at dawn.”

The men in windbreakers nodded and smiled at each other.

L
uz was standing on the cantina porch when the shooter and Danny returned from Ian’s place. She’d borrowed an iron and had
pressed her yellow dress, bathed, and washed her black hair, letting it hang straight and long. A pale orange hibiscus was
fastened just behind her left ear. Up close and over time, even the exotic becomes common and un-beheld, and in the daily
slog of life, Danny sometimes forgot how beautiful Luz María could be. She had a beauty all her own, warm and unaffected,
almost the peasant but with a hint of something more—on the borderline of regal, maybe.

As he and the shooter rounded a corner and saw her on the cantina porch, Danny realized he’d always thought of her as a girl.
But along the way, María de la Luz Santos had become a woman in all the dimensions that defined a woman, and Danny had somehow
missed the transformation.

The shooter couldn’t stop looking at her, stood there locked down and staring, until he caught himself. He cleared his throat
and sat on the porch railing, scuffling dust around with his desert boot, looking first at his feet, then up at the curve
of night and the stars sprinkled across it.

Danny said, ’You look as good as it gets, Luz, and better than that.”

She smiled at him, hooked her left arm in his, her right arm in the shooter’s, and the three of them walked slowly along the
cobblestones to a place where music was playing.

The dance was held in an area called
el centro,
near the plaza. It was more or less an open-air community center, thirty feet wide and fifty long, with concrete walls on
all sides and a concrete floor, and a basketball hoop at one end.

As they entered the dancing grounds, Danny looked up the hill behind
el centro.
A hundred feet above and off to the right, he could see Ian and someone else—the friend, Gustavo, apparently—drinking and
playing dominoes beneath the yellow orange of an overhead light. Ian tipped back his head and took a long drink of tequila,
hearing the music float up from the dancing place, remembering the dreams of silver he’d followed through the canyons of Mexico.
Christ, it hadn’t been a bad life, not all that bad, and God was gracious when tequila allowed Him to be.