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.
SLOW WALTZ IN ZAPATA
Luz 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.
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.