The Hemingway Thief (17 page)

I didn't move. I stood with the last bite of sandwich stuck in my cheek like a wad of chewing tobacco. It was insane to keep going at this point, especially for nothing but a story. I'd already had plenty of adventure to draw on, and I could write a pretty good book on just what happened in Tequilero. All I would have to do is come up with an ending, and therein lay the problem. I am not just a writer, but also a reader. I have a voracious appetite for the written word that borders on addiction. Surely, just as the dipsomaniac is unable to stop until the very last pour from the bottle, I cannot stop a story until it is done. I must know how it ends. I have read some terrible, pathetic, and appalling works simply because I could not stop. Whether it is Tullamore Dew or rotgut, I must finish the bottle.

And then there was the voice in my head. Stinking of literal alcohol and garnished with derision.
He
was telling me what I could not do.
He
was telling me I would die out there screaming like a child.
He
was telling me how small I was.
He
was telling me to quit, to give up, to be the impuissant scribbler of fiction I knew that I was deep down .

He
could go fuck himself.

And then Grady emerged. He dropped heavily to the ground and stomped up to me. His great, shaggy head blocked the sun. He looked over his shoulder to make sure we didn't have an audience.

“Problem?”

“There's an argument going on in my head between my parents,” I said.

“Yeah, that's a problem. What does your mom say?”

“She says this is the stupidest thing I have ever done in a long and rich history of stupid things.”

“Is that all?”

“She says I don't really know you,” I said. “That I shouldn't put my life in the hands of a man I've known less than a month.

“What does your dad say?”

“We don't have time for those kinds of issues,” I said.

“So you're not going?”

“I'm what you might call conflicted.”

Grady sighed and threw up his hands. “Alright,” he growled, and looked over his shoulder like a man about to tell a dirty joke. “Here it is. They were two kids. College kids, but smart, you know? They had a decent smuggling op going, grass mostly, but sometimes the hard stuff. That's where I came in. Anytime they brought in coke or heroin, anything like that. They called me. They told me where and when, and I'd set up the raid. They would always be gone before I got there, but we'd get their buyer. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” I said. Why was he telling me this now?

“We offer rewards for that kind of information. Bigger the bust, bigger the reward. Deal was I got half and they could count on me to tip them off if the heat was onto their grass shipments.”

“So you were on the take,” I said. Grady shook his head and clenched his fists.

“No,” he said. “I never took a bribe. I just kept my part of the informant reward. Happens more often than you'd think.”

“So that's it?” I said. “That's where your money came from.”

“No.”

“Then where?”

“Shut the fuck up and I'll tell you,” Grady said. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “This was New Orleans, right? Lots of smugglers. Lots of competition. One day, this fat Frenchman knocks on my door. Shoves a briefcase full of cash in my arms. Tells me I don't work with those kids anymore. Tells me next time they call me about a raid I should call him.”

“You did?”

Grady nodded.

“What happened?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I left the next day. Haven't been back since. Haven't called anybody. I imagine they didn't fare well.”

“That's it?”

“That's it. That's who I am.”

“I have to be honest, Grady, that doesn't make me feel better,” I said.

“It should. That's the darkest thing about me and I told you all of it,” Grady said. “Only thing I can give you is my trust. I just gave it to you. If that ain't good enough for your mom, then she can go fuck herself.” He turned and made for the RV. He was inside before I could say anything.

I looked behind me. Shrubs and desert. I looked to my left. Desert, but no shrubs. I looked to my right. Mountains obscured by the hazy heat and the one cloud in the bright-blue sky. In front of me was a dirty, poorly maintained RV, a former hit man, a grifter, and a friend of less than thirty days whom I realized I didn't know at all.

I climbed aboard.

Chapter Eighteen

We drove west into the hazy blue-grey horizon. Mountains rose and fell beside and under us. The road had become little more than a subtle path about fifteen feet wide and was discernible only in that there were slightly fewer shrubs and the rocks in it were only the size of small dogs. We passed through sparse cottonwood forests, scabrous ridges, and utterly depressing former
ejidos
, the communal subsistence farms that gang-reaped the once-fertile land, leaving it naked, broken, and damaged.

The days in the Mexican desert were long and even longer when traveling in silence amongst men you couldn't trust. Funny thing, doubt—it marches into your brain and sets up camp without any invitation. It's nothing much at first, just a fire and a pup-tent. But that tent can become a settlement, and, if left unattended, it can grow into a thriving metropolis, overgrown and overpopulated. The town of doubt about my compatriots had become large enough to warrant its own McDonald's.

And then we were on foot, Milch and I, dusk coming on fast and the falling sun at our backs. We only had to hoof it for half a mile, but my feet began to hurt after less than fifty feet of the hard-packed dirt that served as a road. Walking into town had been, of course, Digby's idea. There was one road into Los Ojos, and one road out. The RV would be as inconspicuous as a streaker blowing across the stage at the Oscars. After the incident at Tequilero, it wasn't a good idea to be seen with it.

That went for Digby, too. He was our guide in the strange wasteland of the Sierra Madres, but he had become a liability. We couldn't be seen with him, and any connections he might have had were forfeit. He could point us in the right direction, but he couldn't go with us. He was like Moses except he used to kill people for a living, and where we were headed was as far from the land of milk and honey as one could possibly get.

Los Ojos.

There had been a farm there once. By all accounts it had been an alfalfa farm. In the 1970s there had been an American program to deploy the herbicide paraquat over the many marijuana fields in Mexico. Not all of the fields the US hit had belonged to reefer farms.

Cracked and sun-bleached wood pillars stood every few feet along the road like old vets watching a Memorial Day parade. They had been part of a stockade fence in another life, and beyond them was the collapsing husk of the barn. It wasn't much more than a leaning frame with a few recalcitrant, weathered boards hanging on like old and unloved relatives. The corpse of a John Deere tractor sat beneath the remnants of the roof, rusted and useless. The land around it was barren, burnt, desolate. That side of the road was failure. On the other side, however, was death.

When Digby said we were heading for a ghost town, I imagined the comical western burg from that episode of
The Brady Bunch
, the one where the old prospector locks them in jail and steals the family station wagon. What Milch and I found was not a series of old-timey western facades, but a spattered grouping of ashen, dead buildings huddled around a dry and blackened stone well. There were a few burnt-out buildings that looked like a herd of felled mastodons. One might have been the general store, maybe the town hall, or maybe it had never been anything. The rest of the buildings were too rotted, some to the point of near disintegration, for my imagination to assign any past to them. It was a putrefying graveyard of dead architecture. Gleaming chrome and sheet metal pocked the spaces between the carrion buildings. Motorcycles mostly, with the occasional muscle car or Escalade nestled in amongst the choppers and hogs. They were vehicles for tough men; not a Camry in the bunch.

There was a small shack on the far edge of town. The sun glimmered off the slanted corrugated-tin roof, and I had to shade my eyes as Milch and I walked to it. The walls were made of white stucco, and the door was solid steel painted the color of dried blood. It was the size of a toll booth. Though no sign announced it, I knew this was Chavez's place. I knocked three times on the claret door and waited.

The plan was simple, which did not preclude it from going to hell and ending with my bloody corpse in a shallow grave out in the desert. Digby would drop us off so we could come in on foot. Grady would go with Digby so they could discuss what Digby had dubbed “Plan B.” They would take the RV and blow past Los Ojos and on to the next town for better and less conspicuous transportation. What this would be or how they would obtain it was not information he was willing to share. Maybe they were going to trade the RV, or maybe Digby had a few thousand more dollars stashed in the upholstery. It wasn't my problem. Part two of the plan was my problem, and it was infinitely more difficult.

The door opened and a large Mexican man in a tuxedo stepped out of the darkness. It was impossible to imagine this hulking man in formal wear occupying the small hut from which he had emerged.

“
Si
?” he said.

“I don't speak Spanish,” I said with a sheepish look at his magenta cummerbund.

“Sir, this isn't a place for tourists,” he said in unaccented English. He offered an uncomfortable smile and held his hands out in a gesture that was both conciliatory and admonishing.

“I'm not a tourist,” I said, pretending not to be shocked by the Mexican's command of my native tongue. “I'm an author.”

“This isn't a place for authors, sir,” the Mexican said. He sounded bored, as if I had woken him from his evening nap.

“That's not what I hear,” I said. “I understand that this place was visited by Ernest Hemingway shortly before his death.”

“Maybe,” the Mexican said, unimpressed. Milch tugged at my elbow and stepped in front of me.

“My name is Joe,” he said, flashing that shark-tooth smile of his. “And yours?”

“Luis.”

“Luis. I have never met a Luis before,” Milch said, rubbing at his lower lip as if he were cycling through his life, looking for any other men named Luis. “That means that from now on whenever I hear the name Luis I will be forced to think of you. You will be the yard stick by which every other Luis will be measured. Do you think you can handle that responsibility?”

“I can handle it,” Luis said, and there was the slightest infinitesimal hint of a smile at the corners of the doorman's mouth.

“I knew you could,” Milch said, and put a hand on the man's ham hock of a shoulder. Luis didn't flinch, look at the hand, or back away from it. He showed no offense at the gesture, and instead leaned closer to Milch, eyebrows raised, waiting for his pitch. “Now, my man here is telling the truth. He is an author. It's not important that you know his name. The important thing is the name by which the world knows him: Toulouse Velour.”

There is a scene from
Romancing the Stone
that flooded back to me. Michael Douglas's wayward adventurer and Kathleen Turner's romance novelist show up at the door of a South American drug lord, looking for help. Of course the drug lord, played by El Guapo from
¡Three Amigos!
, was a big fan of Turner's novels and invites them in for cocktails. As Luis squinted at my face going through his mental Rolodex, I had a fantasy that this would go the same way. Luis would declare his undying love and affection for Alasdair MacMerkin and beg me for details on the next installment. He would become a loyal majordomo during our brief sojourn at Chavez's place, getting us whatever we needed with a dopey hound-dog smile. This fantasy lasted about three seconds before Luis clicked his tongue and shook his head.

“Never heard of him,” he said.

“I'm not surprised,” Milch said, undeterred. “But regardless of that, you have to understand that this man here,” he pointed at me with the flourish of a car model showing off the latest concept car, “is an industry unto himself. Are you familiar with the term
ten percenter
? Well, that is my man here. He shits out bestsellers before breakfast. You understand what I'm telling you? And now he's writing a story on Ernest Hemingway, and all he wants to do is talk to your boss.”

“No one talks to Mr. Chavez,” Luis said.

“That's not completely true, though, is it, Luis?” Milch said. “I mean someone must talk to him. He's a businessman. Businessmen don't do business without talking, am I right?”

“People talk to him, I guess,” Luis said.

“OK, yes, see, there we go,” Milch said. “So there must be a process, right? Standard operating procedure for talking to the big man?”

“You have to know somebody.”

“I do know somebody,” Milch said, and gave the doorman a light pat on the cheek. “I know you, Luis.” Milch placed himself between the doorman and myself. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled something out in his fist. Luis looked at Milch's hand and then his face. He took the thing in Milch's hand, stepped back, and waved to the open door. When he spoke, it was in the bored, robotic monotone often heard from carnival-ride operators.

“Step inside. Keep your arms to your side and limit your movement after the door closes. There will be thirty seconds of complete darkness before the descent. There will be a small jolt at the beginning. Do not be alarmed. The descent will last two full minutes. Do not open the door. The door will be opened for you.”

We stepped into the shed. In the brief moment before Luis slammed the door behind us, I took in the measure of the room. There was nothing. Rough stucco walls and a tear-drop steel plate for a floor. The door closed and then there wasn't even that to look at. The darkness was complete.