and closer to the landing zone than they were, he could see the shooter down on one knee, reloading clips. Christ, one little short-barreled pistol. He was holding off a small invasion force with it, but Danny could see it was going to be over soon unless they made the chopper. There were too many on the other side, too many bad guys, even for Clayton Price.
A gringo in a blue windbreaker was creeping toward the shooter, shotgun held ready. Soldiers were following the shotgun man, being cautious now. Danny was sure the shotgun was going to get Clayton Price, who was still pushing ammunition into clips. And it was curious… curious how Danny’s allegiances were somehow shifting, away from the forces of light and toward something else. He had the feeling he should call out to Clayton Price, warn him about what was coming behind him, be part of the old American custom favoring the underdog in all things.
But Clayton Price didn’t need Danny’s help. He scrambled behind a bush, jammed a clip into the Beretta, went to his belly, and waited until he saw shotgun man’s feet. The Beretta popped and a bullet blew into the man’s right knee. As the man staggered and instinctively reached downward to touch shattered bone, the shooter came out low and hit the man with another round. The man staggered and fell forward, the business end of his Remington pumpgun plunging into the earth and simultaneously discharging, blowing up in his face. The soldiers behind retreated and went to ground, wondering what the hell they were doing in the middle of a bunch of crazy gringos trying to kill each other.
The shooter was running again, heading toward the silver mine. Luz and Danny began to move fast, Luz bleeding on her face and arms and back from the fall. Helicopter coming in, getting ready to set down. They met up with the shooter fifty yards from the landing zone. He had wide sweat circles under his arms, the denim shirt sticking to him and bloody on one shoulder. He’d been hit, but not bad, evidently. He looked like a big cat, moved like one, some kind of curious light in his eyes, wild and yet focused, his chest pumping for air, out on the rice paddies again.
The three of them crouched there, looking around. Behind them, soldiers had seen the helicopter landing and, regrouped by an officer, were creeping through scrub trees and brush toward the silver mine.
“This is it! Move!” the shooter hissed. He grabbed Luz’s hand and started running toward the chopper settling onto the gravel at the mine entrance, rotor blades blowing brown dust up and around it.
Coming to his feet, Danny slipped on loose stones, got up, slipped again, and followed Luz and the shooter, who were already fifteen yards ahead of him. Gunshots from behind, small poofs of earth where the bullets hit. Through blowing dust and the sweat running into his eyes, Danny could see Luz and the shooter up ahead, Luz in almost total fatigue, being dragged by an arrow named Clayton Price.
We might make it, Danny thought. We might make it… we’re going to make it, by God.
“Run, Luz!” Danny screamed.
The cargo door on the chopper slid open. Through the swirl of dust Danny could see two men squatting inside, and both men were pointing automatic weapons directly at Luz and Clayton Price. And the men were firing the weapons, not over Luz’s and the shooter’s heads, but at them and at Danny. Danny hit the ground at full tilt, sliding along on sharp gravel, tearing his chest. Ahead of him the shooter skidded to a stop and started pulling Luz back in Danny’s direction. She was confused, Clayton Price shouting at her to run back the way they’d come.
Oh no—Danny was screaming inside himself—oh no!… goddammit no!—not this, not Luz.
The line of fire from the chopper swept across Luz and the shooter like a big, invisible knife blade. They jerked and spun, stumbled and went down, the shooter still holding on to her hand, blood coming from her face. The shooter wrapped himself around Luz, covering her, aiming his pistol toward the chopper. He scrubbed one of the men with his second shot. The other man ducked back inside the cargo bay out of sight.
The shooter struggled to his feet, somehow he did that, pulling Luz with him. A bullet had sliced across and through her cheek, and she was bleeding from three other places on her chest, but she was still alive, and Danny could see her clawing Clayton Price’s shirt, grabbing his hair, her head lolling from side to side, only vaguely aware of what was happening, death-terror and instinct taking over.
He lifted her onto his left shoulder, her legs to the front of him, and began stumbling toward Danny. And lastingly curls that memory in the mind of Danny Pastor, the image of Clayton Price carrying Luz María through the morning dust, his legs splayed and beginning to buckle but still coming on and refusing to cease what it was Clayton Price did best. And never, ever, in the times to come, would Danny forget the look on the shooter’s face at that moment— bleeding from a half dozen parts of his body and with one ear nearly missing, he was no longer human but something else altogether, gone completely feral, eyes crazy-wide with a transcending agony all their own and looking not at Danny but somewhere back of Danny, living now in another place only a man such as Clayton Price could ever understand. With Luz balanced on one shoulder, he brought the Beretta up and began firing over Danny’s head at whatever was coming from behind.
Danny rolled into a brushy ditch and yelled, “This way!” The shooter, vest and pants and shirt blood soaked, eyes glazed over and someplace else, nonetheless heard him and started toward where Danny was lying. There wasn’t much left of the woman over his shoulder, the soft, brown woman who only a few hours before had been wearing a flower in her hair and a yellow dress and dancing with a man who had never danced before. Luz María was no longer moving, eyes opalescent and head dangling in a lifeless way even as Clayton Price carried her.
An automatic weapon in the chopper’s cargo bay opened up again. The shooter stumbled and went to his knees, somehow got back to his feet once more, still balancing Luz on his shoulder. Danny could see bullets marching through the dust and then up and through Clayton Price and Luz. As the bullets cut into them, Clayton Price twisted toward the chopper and tried to aim the Beretta, but what had once been his face disappeared instantly in a spray of flesh and bone. He fell a few feet from the ditch, Luz tumbling from his shoulder. The two of them lay tangled, their bodies jerking as a burst from the automatic weapon made one final pass over them. After that, the soldiers began firing at the helicopter, and the automatic weapon inside the cargo door turned its attention to them.
The helicopter lifted off, and it never has been clear to Danny just who was on what side that morning. In all the confusion nobody apparently knew who was an ally and who was the enemy, so everybody had simply started shooting at everyone else. The soldiers on the ground hadn’t been told the chopper was on their side, or maybe somebody didn’t want them to know. Or maybe it wasn’t, maybe there were three sides. After a while, it didn’t make any difference.
Danny checked himself. Chest bleeding bad from where he’d slid on the rocks, but all right otherwise. He called out for the shooter, for Luz. No answer. He didn’t expect one. From where the two of them lay in the dust, there was only silence, and Danny was sure it would be that way forever. Clayton Price had stopped circling the ponds of autumn, had come to rest, and had taken Luz María with him.
Danny pushed up and ran along a shallow arroyo, staying low and eventually working his way up toward the main part of the village. The shooting had stopped, villagers were peering out of windows and doors at bodies littered around the plaza. Not as many bodies as it seemed to Danny when all the shooting had been taking place. Three men were down near the plaza, two who were injured slumped against the gazebo. The white Ford van was burning, black smoke rising high and fast into the mountain air. Inside the van, a gringo in a sweat-stained safari jacket lay crumpled between the rammed-back engine and his seat. Danny watched from behind a building as the van exploded and set four of the plaza’s trees on fire.
Danny made it to the Bronco, put it in four-wheel drive, and maneuvered through the jungle, then slowly climbed up a hillside northeast of the village. On
the main highway, the Durango road, he looked back down into the village and beyond. Near the silver mine, men were dragging bodies through the dust, leaving dark, wet trails.
He worked on getting his head clear and drove up the highway, taking the mountain road toward Ponuco. When he got to the turnoff for the old Guadalupe church, he bumped Vito along the riverbed for a mile, where he parked it behind some brush. Don José Fierro heard the Bronco grinding over river rocks and came down to investigate. The affairs of the world were not his, and he cared nothing for what might have happened beyond the small universe over which he watched.
Danny stayed with the Keeper of Guadalupe for three days. Don José Fierro sloshed up a concoction of river mud and something else, smearing it on the deep cuts Danny had sustained from diving onto gravel. Whatever it was, it worked, and the cuts stopped bleeding. Don José gave him one of his shirts to wear, three sizes too small, but Danny was grateful and left a hundred bucks when he pulled out on the evening of the third day. The old man didn’t care about money but took it and waved in the general direction of the church, indicating the money would be used for repair and maintenance.
Two miles from the Durango road, Danny stopped and got out. The cliff on which he stood dropped away for a thousand feet, ending in heavy trees and brush at the bottom. He pointed Vito toward the cliff, put the gears in neutral, and shut off the engine. Two hard pushes and the Bronco went over the side, bounced in a tear of metal on an outcropping three hundred feet down, then fell clean all the way to where it finally crashed into trees and brush. The last few days still seemed like a movie, all of it.
An hour later, Danny flagged down a bus headed for Mazatlán. The bus wound through the mountains and when it passed the village of Zapata, Danny stared straight ahead.
On the edge of Concordia, furniture makers worked in the twilight and smoke from cooking fires drifted over the highway. Children played by the roadside and brown dogs hung around restaurant tables. To Danny, thinking about the small war that had occurred in Zapata only three days past, it seemed curious somehow that life had not altered for these people. What appeared large to Danny was nothing to them. Mexico had absorbed the blows and gone on, as it always had.
A few miles east of Concordia, the bus passed through the waters of a small creek, and Danny Pastor looked upstream toward the place where he and Clayton Price and Luz had bathed a week ago. At the Pemex station south of Mazatlán, the burned remains of a white Ford van sat off to one side by itself. It was twilight, and rush hour, and there were long lines of vehicles waiting for gasoline.
YOU DO WHAT YOU CAN
Danny stopped in Mazatlán and stayed for two days in a tourist hotel, figuring nobody would pay much attention to a gringo tourist; the town was full of them. He left the room only once, to buy a couple of shirts and a new pair of jeans, some newspapers. Nothing in the papers about the shootout, but it would have been old news by then; five days had gone by since it happened. Later on there was a brief article in a regional edition of Time with the headline SHOOTOUT IN THE MOUNTAINS.
The piece was sketchy, stating only that a gun battle between elements of the Mexican army and a deranged ex-marine had taken place in the Mexican village of Zapata. An army commander was quoted as saying the mission was successfully completed after a brief, early morning skirmish in which no soldiers were injured and the ex-marine had been killed. In the article, the shooter was correctly identified as Clayton Price, and it was indicated not much was known about him except for his military career, which lasted eight years. There was mention of his Purple Heart and several other medals awarded for his service in Vietnam and quoted an unidentified diplomatic source as saying Mr. Price had turned into a degenerate killer after he left the military. Luz was listed only as an “unidentified Mexican woman who was the assassins gun moll.” It also said an unidentified white male was with them, but no trace of him had been found.
In Mazatlán, Danny purchased a battered Dodge pickup, using a fair chunk of the five thousand Clayton Price had given him. He headed down Route 15 toward Puerto Vallarta, stopped in Escuinapa, and bought a large flashlight along with bolt cutters and wire clippers. Through the late afternoon, he took the road west toward Teacapán and slowed down six miles out. The cage was still there under a banana tree, the ocelot still pacing. Danny parked at an abandoned pier on the lake or estuary or whatever the backwater was called and pretended to be interested in the scenery.
After dark he pulled the truck up near the ocelot and gingerly approached the cage, keeping his flashlight pointed at the ground until he reached the cage. The cat stopped pacing and snarled, lunged at the wire, and hooked a fang over it. It wasn’t going to be easy.
Danny let the cat quiet down a little and decided to use the long-handled bolt cutters, closing down on the padlock holding the cage shut. The steel was low grade, and he got through it on the second try. He hooked the bolt cutters onto the door wire and swung it open, dropping the cutters and running for the truck all at the same time. The cat was out of the cage and bounding across the road toward a nearby field before Danny could shut the truck door. He watched el gato moving fast through moonlight, into long grass, gone.
By the following afternoon, the battered Dodge was just north of Puerto Vallarta. Danny hardly recalled the road down from Mazatlán, thinking and remembering and shaking his head at his own arrogance and how desire replaces judgment on warm night in a Mexican beach town or, for that matter, on white porch swings in Kansas.
He made a right turn, and twenty-four miles west the road ended at the beach village of Punta de Mita. Danny bought a beer and walked out on the sand, sitting by the water’s edge. In the quiet, he listened to the waves and thought about Luz, remembering how they had come here and swum naked at night. She’d bobbed up from under the water, pushing her long black hair back over her shoulders, laughing as she’d wrapped her legs around the wild expatriate called Danny Pastor. That was a long time ago, it seemed.
Danny sat there for hours, walking back to the beach restaurant for more beer, then returning to his place in the sand. The restaurant closed and still he sat there, looking out at the rocky islands and remembering María de la Luz Santos. God, she was beautiful… and warm… and deep-down loving and all of those things for which he hadn’t appreciated her enough when she was there with him. He wished then he had married her and taken her north with him. He didn’t feel much like a wild expatriate anymore. He felt stupid and alone and sorry.
Danny made Puerto Vallarta and opened the door to his apartment at midnight. It was quiet and smelled a little stale, but underneath the staleness was the scent of Luz, her perfume, her body oil on the sheets. He turned on the lights and went immediately to the bathroom, looking for the gun. It wasn’t there, but what was there was a knock on the door. He opened it: three cops and another man wearing a business suit. The suit held up a plastic bag and dangled it in Danny’s face.
In the bag was the shooter’s gun, the one he’d used in El Niño. Somebody had known something and had talked about it. Probably the guy who was mad at Danny for spewing oily smoke into his apartment the week before. Shit, who knows. Who cares. He heard a rumor later on, however, that the police had worked over Felipe pretty hard, and he might have said Luz and Danny had been in El Rondo the night of the killing and that they’d left with Clayton Price.
anny got a ten-year sentence on vague charges, something about ’assisting criminal elements.” The assassination weapon in his apartment was fairly heavy circumstantial evidence, but they never actually charged him with the shooting itself. After a little over seventeen months in a Mexico City prison, his cell door swung open one day, and he was told he was free to go and to get the hell out of Mexico and never come back. Vamos, andele! No explanation, nothing. They’d tired of feeding him, that’s all he could figure out, and escorted him to the bus station, where he was given a one-way ticket for Laredo.
With Clayton Price gone, Danny had welshed on his bargain and h
ad written up the whole adventure while he was in prison, bribing a guard to mail it on to his New “fork agent. He never saw the manuscript again, never heard a thing. Maybe it didn’t get to her. Maybe it did. To hell with it. It was a pretty breathless piece of writing, anyway.
Danny had kept a stash of emergency money in a Chicago bank and sent for it. With interest it came to a little over six thousand dollars. He bought another old pickup and drove it south across the border, pulling into Zapata three days later.
Nobody remembered him. He ate at the cantina and took the same room where he and Luz had stayed a year and a half earlier. Sitting on the bed, he thought about the last time they’d made love on that same bed. He walked down to the silver mine and looked around. No trace of the shootout; he didn’t expect there’d be any. But scuffing in the dust, he found a rusty shell casing, small caliber. From the shooter’s pistol, maybe. He stuck it in his pocket and carries it with him, some kind of talisman and some kind of warning instead of a tattoo on the thumb.
A couple of new gringos had moved into the village, and Danny talked with them later that night. They drank tequila and regaled him with stories of the great Zapata shootout, which, of course, had become part of the village’s long saga and a tourist attraction in its own right. In the story, the shooter was made out to be bigger than life, which in a way he was, Danny supposed. And Luz was said to be one of the most desirable women ever to walk the earth, which in a way she was, at least that’s where Danny’s thinking had taken him by that time. There was only brief mention of a third person, another gringo. Nobody knew what happened to him for sure, some hearsay about him dying in prison.