Ask for Me Tomorrow

Eight

The jail was in the center of Rio Seco as if it had been the first structure and the rest of the city had been built around it. It was shaped like a roundhouse and circled by stone walls twenty-five or thirty feet high which gave it its name: the stone quarry. LA CANTERA, PENITENCIARIA DEL ESTADO was carved above the main entrance where Aragon stood with the other people waiting to be admitted.

In spite of the earliness of the hour, traffic was heavy and the crowd outside the jail was large — a few men of varying ages, but mostly women carrying babies and straw bags and packages wrapped in newspaper, and a handful of prostitutes in miniskirts and maxiwigs. Children played in the street, oblivious to the honking of horns and squealing of tires, or ran up the stone steps and slid down the iron banisters. Apart from the crowd an older American couple, neatly dressed and quiet, stood with their arms locked as if they were holding each other up.

One of the three guards on duty, a young man wearing a cowboy hat and oversized boots that looked like hand-me-downs from a bigger brother, fielded questions: “Ten more minutes, I don’t make the rules, señora... Carlos Gonzalez got out last week... Café opens at nine... You can go home, girls, it’s too early. Give the boys a chance to wash up... If Gonzalez left a message, I don’t know about it... Anyone want a shouter? Ten cents for a shouter, fifteen cents for a first-class shouter.”

The American man held up his hand. “Yes. Please.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen cents.”

“Name?”

“Sandra Boyd.”

“Sandra Boyd. Okay, anyone else?... Ten cents for Cecilio Martinez... Five cents for Manuel Ysidro. That’s a whisper, maybe you don’t want him to hear... Ten for Fernando Escobar... Ten, Inocente Santana. We got a lot of Inocentes in this place. Not a guilty in sight, ha ha... Carlos Gonzalez. You’re wasting your money, señora. I told you, he’s gone. Okay, ten for Gonzalez.”

“Lockwood,” Aragon said. “B. J. Lockwood and Harry Jenkins.”

“That’s two names.”

“Yes.”

“You can’t have one shouter for two names. You must have one shouter for each name.”

“All right, thirty cents.”

At eight thirty the gates of the Quarry opened and the crowd surged inside. No attempt was made to question or search anyone or to examine packages. It would have been impossible under the circumstances. The pushing and shoving and screaming reminded Aragon of doorbuster sales at some of the stores back home.

Within the walls, similar high-pressure merchandising was taking place. The prison peddlers began hawking their wares: pottery, leatherwork, novelties, food and drink, children’s toys. A trio of mariachis singing “Guadalajara, Guadalajara,” gave a fiesta atmosphere to the scene.

The mariachis picked Aragon as their first mark of the morning.

“You want to hear a special song, señor?”

“No thanks.”

“We sing anything you say.”

“Not right now.”

“We know a hundred songs.”

Aragon paid twenty-five cents not to hear any of them.

The cellblocks were built in a circle around a huge recreation yard, where a soccer game was in progress. While he waited in line at the iron-grilled information window, he watched the soccer game. Both sides were dressed alike, so it was difficult to follow. But it was a very lively spectacle, since there were no referees.

Guadalajara, Guadalajara.

You buy a taco, señor? An empanada?

Real, hand-tooled leather purses and belts at prices so low it is a crime.

Balloons, dolls, madonnas, bracelets, cigarettes.

A fight broke out between two men peddling identical calfskin wallets. Compared to the soccer game, it was dull and half-hearted and attracted little attention. Obviously the inmates had more interest in soccer than in fistfights that consisted mainly of loud words and soft blows.

The shouters were already at work:

“Oswaldo Fernandez, hey, Oswaldo Fernandez, hey, Fernandez.”

“Cruz Rivera, ay ay Cruz, ay ay Rivera, ay ay ay ay Cruz Rivera.”

“B. J. Lockwood... Lock — wood.”

“Harry Jenkins... You are wanted, Harry Jenkins.”

“Juanita Maria Placencia, come here, Jua — ni — ta!”

“Sandra Boyd, if you please... Sandra Boyd... Sandra Boyd.”

“Amelio Gutierrez, answer to your name.”

When Aragon’s turn came he presented his credentials to the uniformed man at the information window. After consulting with his colleagues, the man sent a runner to summon the assistant to the assistant to the warden himself.

The new arrival introduced himself as Superintendent Perdiz. “These two Americans you are asking about, I never heard of them. It would be better for you to come back later when the warden is here.”

“How much later?”

“Wednesday. He works very hard and needs long weekends to recuperate at his beach house.”

“Who’s in charge when the warden’s away?”

“The assistant warden. He’ll be back tomorrow, Tuesday. He doesn’t need such long weekends because his responsibilities are not so great.”

“He’s got a beach house, too, I suppose.”

“No. He likes to go to the mountains. The air is more invigorating. Here in Rio Seco we have bad air. Do you smell it? Phew!”

Aragon smelled it. Traffic odors, people odors, jail odors, exhaust fumes, sweat, garlic, urine, cigarette smoke, antiseptic.

“Phew,” Perdiz said again. “Don’t you think so?”

“Yes.”

“Then you understand the need for long weekends out of town?”

“Of course.”

“So now we are in complete agreement. A man, even one in a lowly position like mine, needs a country house for a breath of sea or mountain air on the weekends. I’d like to buy such a place but my salary won’t allow it.”

“Would ten dollars help?”

“A little more might inspire me to go and search the files personally. What do you think my personal attention is worth?”

“Fifteen dollars.”

“That’s most kind of you.”

Perdiz accepted the bribe with solemn dignity. After all, it was part of the system, paying a mordida to influyentes, and he was an influyente. “You wait here.”

Aragon waited. He watched the soccer game some more and bought a wallet from the loser of the fistfight, a can of ginger ale and a doll made of two withered oranges with cloves marking its features and dried red chiles for arms and legs. He didn’t know why he’d bought such a ridiculous thing until he held it in his hand and studied it for a while: it looked like Pablo, round-eyed and vacant-faced, untouched, untouchable.

The shouters were still at work. At least one of them had brought results — the American couple were talking to a pale stringy-haired young woman wearing a ragged poncho that reached almost to her ankles. The man was doing most of the talking, the older woman was crying, the younger one looked bored.

Perdiz returned. Nowhere in the files was there any mention of B. J. Lockwood.

“You should have some record of him,” Aragon said. “He was arrested.”

“How do you know he was arrested?”

“I was told.”

“Who told you?”

“A priest.”

“A priest. Then it’s very likely true that he was arrested. But maybe it was a mistake. Maybe he didn’t do anything wrong, so they let him go. If we kept records on everyone who never did anything wrong, we’d have a jail full of paper. A paper jail, isn’t that a funny idea?”

“A real rib-tickler,” Aragon said. Gilly was now an unofficial contributor to a beach house or maybe a mountain cabin, but she wasn’t any closer to B. J. “What about Harry Jenkins?”

“I could find nothing concerning him either. Truthfully — you want truthfully?”

“Yes.”

“All right, truthfully. We don’t like to keep records on Americans. It’s bad for international relations. Consider which is more important, a few pieces of paper or a great war between nations.”

“I don’t think anyone would start even a very small war over Harry Jenkins.”

“One never knows. Peace today, war tomorrow.”

“Yes. Well, thank you for your trouble, Perdiz.” And may your beach house be swept away by a tidal wave and your mountain cabin buried under an avalanche.

He began pushing his way through the crowd in the direction of the main gate. When he passed the American couple he saw that both the man and the older woman were now crying, but the girl hadn’t changed expression. She was absently tying, untying and retying a couple of strands of her hair. On impulse Aragon handed her the dried orange-and-chili doll that looked like Pablo. She immediately picked out the cloves that were his eyes and popped them in her mouth. Nobody said anything.

He had almost reached the main gate when he felt a hand touch his back between his shoulder blades. He turned abruptly, expecting to catch an inept pickpocket. Instead, he saw a Mexican woman about thirty, with dark despondent eyes and wiry black hair that seemed to have sprung out of her scalp in revolt. Her arms and hands were covered with scars of various sizes and shapes and colors, as if the wounds had occurred at different times under different circumstances.

Her voice had the hoarseness of someone who talked too loud and too long. “I heard a shouter calling for Harry Jenkins. I said, ‘Who hired you?’ and he said, ‘An American with big glasses and a blue striped shirt.’ That’s you.”

“That’s me. Tomas Aragon.”

“Why do you want to see Harry?”

“Why do you want to know why I want to see Harry?”

“I’m Emilia, Harry’s good friend. Very good, special. Someday we will be married in the church but that must wait. Right now I am in and he is out. Before that, I was out and he was in, and before that, we were both in. What did Harry do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you looking for him?”

“Actually I’m looking for a friend of his. I thought Harry might give me — or sell me — some information.”

“You buy information?”

“Sometimes.”

Her lips parted enough to reveal two slightly protruding front teeth. It was the closest Emilia ever came to a smile. “I have information.”

“What kind?”

“All kinds. The best. I’ve been around the Quarry off and on since I was fifteen. When I go away they beg me, ‘Emilia Ontiveros, come back, come back.’ If I say no, they invent charges to force me to come back because I am such a fine cook. I am the head cook in the Quarry café.”

That explained the scars. They were burns and cuts accumulated throughout the years.

“Do you have information about Harry Jenkins, Emilia?”

“He is a snake. That much I give you free. The rest will be more expensive.”

“I’d like to talk to you. Isn’t there some place we could have a little more privacy?”

“There’s a talking room. It will cost you money, fifty cents. But a dollar would be better.”

It was probably the primary law of the Quarry: a dollar was better than fifty cents but not as good as two dollars, which was vastly inferior to ten.

For a dollar they were given a couple of wooden stools in the corner of a room half filled with people, most of them in the fifty-cent, or standing, class. Emilia sat with her scarred hands clenched in her lap.

“A snake,” she repeated. “Though you would never guess it to look at him. Such honest blue eyes, such even teeth.”

“Do you know where he’s living?”

“Ha! I have people keeping track of him every day, every minute. I know what clothes he wears, what he eats for breakfast. He can’t buy a pack of cigarettes without me finding out. What a fool he was to think he could leave me cold after I paid good money for his release. When I leave this place again, I’m going to mash him like a turnip.”

“I thought you intended to get married in the church.”

“First I mash him like a turnip. Then we get married.”

She was unmistakably serious. No matter where he was, Harry’s future didn’t look too bright.

“Marriage might improve my temper,” she added thoughtfully. “I lose it at the stove, at the pots and pans, because they burn me. Then I throw them and they burn me again, and on it goes, back and forth. Do you think marriage has an improving effect?”

“Occasionally.”

“How much are you planning to pay me?”

“You haven’t told me anything useful yet.”

“What do you want to know?”

“You said you and Jenkins served time together.”

“That’s how we met. These two Americans were brought in one day and as soon as I saw Harry my insides started spinning.”

“The other American was Lockwood?”

Emilia nodded. “Him, what a crybaby, always fussing about this and that. The guards had to give him stuff to shut him down. Harry was a real man, pretending he didn’t care what the authorities did to him or how long they kept him there.”

“What was the charge against him?”

“Something silly like cheating. It’s the custom. Somebody cheats you, you cheat somebody else.”

“How did Jenkins get out?”

“Me. I had some money saved — the head cook’s pay is pretty good and there’s nothing pretty to spend it on in this place. When I finished serving my sentence I rented a nice apartment and then I went and paid Harry’s fine and we set up housekeeping. For a while we had a rosy time. But my rosy times never last. As soon as the money ran out, so did Harry. Or tried to. I caught him packing and beat him up, not bad, just enough to put him in the hospital. He didn’t squeal on me — he knew he had it coming — but the doctor at the hospital reported me to the police and they brought me back here to the Quarry. Everybody was glad to see me, of course, because my tamale pie is the best in town... How much are you going to pay me?”

“For telling me your tamale pie is the best in town? Nothing. It’s not the kind of information that’s worth anything to me.”

“What kind do you want? You name it, it’s yours. See, I’m saving up so I can buy my way out of this place and go back with Harry.”

“And mash him like a turnip.”

“Maybe not. Maybe my heart will melt when I see him again.”

Aragon wouldn’t have bet a nickel on it. Emilia’s temper probably had a lower boiling point than her heart. “Is Jenkins still living in the apartment you rented?”

“How could he afford an apartment without my help? No, he has a little room over the shoemaker’s shop, Reynoso’s, on Avenida Gobernador. It’s a low neighborhood, lots of thieves and prostitutes, but Harry hasn’t anything to steal and the prostitutes don’t bother him, because he’s broke. How am I sure? My spies are here, there and everywhere, watching. Right this minute he is” — Emilia consulted a man’s wristwatch which she fished out of the front of her dress — “sleeping. That’s Harry for you. Everybody else running around working and Harry in bed snoring his head off.”

“What does he do when he’s not sleeping?”

“Hangs out at bars and cafés, especially the places where Americans go, El Domino, Las Balatas, El Alegre. He’s not a drunk, liquor’s not one of his weaknesses, he goes there on business.”

“What kind of business?”

“Whatever he thinks of. He’s very smart but he has bad luck. And tourists aren’t as easy as they used to be in the old days when all he had to do was make up a few little stories. Expenses keep going up and up, and tourists keep getting more and more suspicious and stingy.”

Aragon thought of the Hilton price he’d paid for the shack at Viñadaco and he wasn’t surprised that the tourists were getting more wary of Harry’s little stories.

He said, “What happened to Lockwood?”

“I don’t know. Suddenly he left. That was long before I paid Harry’s fine and got him out.”

“Did he come back to visit Jenkins?”

“Why should he? They weren’t friends, they were partners. He blamed Harry for leading him into trouble. How can you lead someone who doesn’t want to go?”

“Did you notice whether Lockwood had any visitors?”

“There are always Americans shut up in this place, and the American consulate sends somebody over to check on them from time to time. Maybe it was one of the consulate that got Lockwood released.”

“Did his case ever come to trial?”

“It was a single case, him and Harry together, when they were brought in. But when the magistrate finally heard it, there was just Harry. Lockwood had disappeared.”

“Do you think he died?”

“A lot of people do,” Emilia said philosophically. “He was an old man, anyway, more than fifty, always throwing up from his stomach.”

“Didn’t Jenkins try to find out what happened to him?”

“If he did he never told me. We had more interesting things to talk about in our rosy times. In the not-so-rosy we didn’t speak to each other at all.”

She repeated Jenkins’ address, Avenida Gobernador above the shop of Reynoso the shoemaker. Aragon thanked her and gave her ten dollars. She didn’t seem too pleased at the amount, but at least she didn’t try to mash him like a turnip.