The Renegades

31

I order two good cognacs and look down at Sunset Boulevard. It’s after midnight and the clubs are still an hour from letting out. The L.A. air is a soft mixture of restaurant and car exhaust and bottled scents with their hint of human rut, all rising up from the strip. I draw it into my lungs before lighting another cigar.

The boy takes his snifter and swirls the liquor and looks out over the city. I clearly remember when I was just a little younger than he is-not that long ago, really-and the terrible sense of liberation I experienced after the tragic death of my family. I was utterly alone, except for a few friends and my dogs. My world became a different place.

“I know where this story is going,” he says.

“You think you know.”

“Laws is doomed by his conscience.”

“But doomed to what? Things change. You will see. Within just a few weeks, I began to see a change in Terry.”

“He regrets his erratic behavior.”

“No. It’s better than that. He doesn’t even see it. Listen, a month later we’re making another run, and Terry asks me to stop off in Puerto Nuevo, the lobster village south of TJ.”

“I’ve taken Erin there.”

“Well, Terry says there’s something he wants to show me in Puerto Nuevo. He says he’s been driving past it his whole life but has never really seen it. But because of something that happened to him a few days ago, he says he sees it now. Gets it, is what he says.”

“You’re leaving something out.”

“Patience. I can’t reveal the future without a present to rest it on, right? Okay, so I’m driving Terry’s red pickup truck. We’ve just crossed the border into Tijuana. Now it’s time for Mexican Customs. A chipper bunch, I can tell you. We’ve got $385,000 and all the usual fishing stuff in the back, protected only by a camper shell and our badges and our weapons and ability to use them. And here’s Terry, sitting next to me, badgering me about Puerto Nuevo.

“I’ve got no interest in Puerto Nuevo. For me, the purpose of this trip is not tourism. All I want to see is El Dorado, get my cut and get home. The truth is that Terry has pissed me off-his drinking, his mood swings, his blather, his new babe, his so-called ideas. But we make it past Mexican Customs. I look at the rearview mirror and watch the Customs booth recede and the officials approach the next vehicle. When I look over at Laws, Terry is staring out the window with an odd smile on his face. He hasn’t had a drink since we left L.A. He hasn’t even joined Avalos for his usual prejourney shot of tequila. Terry was usually drunk by now, and starting in on his second flask. What was up?

“We park outside a very small church on a dirt road in Puerto Nuevo. It is chilly and foggy for June. I smell the ocean, which is just a few yards away, and I also smell the lobsters boiling in the dozens of Puerto Nuevo restaurants up and down the village streets. As a teenager I’d come down here scores of times with Israel and other friends, for drinking and eating the lobsters then sleeping it all off in TJ.

– This is it, said Laws.

– It’s a church.

– Come in. I haven’t been in here since I was a boy. I want to ask you something.

“So I follow him in. Churches have always disturbed me. They make me feel unimportant. I sense the atrocities committed in the name of God through the ages but even that can’t cheer me up that night with Terry. The church is tiny and simple, no vestibule, just a few rows of pews and a raised altar with a small stained-glass window behind it. The cross is smallish and smooth. There are candles and plastic flowers and paintings of saints on heavily lacquered boards hung along the walls. It’s cool and it smells to me like incense and mildew. Laws walks toward the altar, then stops and turns to me, smiling. His bigness is exaggerated by the smallness of the church. He looks almost gigantic in there.

– Laurel and I are going to be married the last Saturday in August.

– Of this year?

– Yes, Coleman. Nine weeks from now. And I want you to be my best man.

– Well, okay. That’s great, Terry. I’m sure she’s a fantastic woman and you deserve her.

– I remember this place from when I was a boy. Dad brought us down here a couple of times to see the blowhole and eat lobster and buy tourist stuff. And I remember standing in this little church. Right here, where we are now. And I remember feeling something here. It was something that moved in my heart, like a tickle, like speeding along a rolling highway when you’re a kid and your dad or mom is driving-you know that tickle in your guts?

– To me it was sexual.

– Well…anyway, I never had that feeling again for about thirty years. Until last Sunday when I took Laurel to church.

“And, of course, I understand: Terry’s beatific stare, his booze-free smuggling, his impending marriage, his renewed interest in this church. I felt like I was standing at the base of a mountain that was about to collapse. Dread? Terror? I’m not sure there’s a word to describe a catastrophe that hasn’t happened yet but assuredly will.

– You found Jesus.

– He found me. Coleman, I never knew how bad I needed to be found. It’s like the feeling I had in this church thirty years ago, but ten times as strong. Fifty times.

– I’m very happy for you and Laurel, Terry. And for you and Jesus. But we should get back to the truck. Mexico is not a place to leave our kind of luggage unattended.

– I’m glad you’ll be there with me, man. Laurel is going to be stoked, too.

“I clap Laws on the shoulder and force a smile. I look into his joyful eyes. But I’m doing a lousy job of hiding my worry. I’m happy that Laws has found a fortune, and a woman with unbelievable legs who wants to marry him, and found Jesus, too. But I can’t avoid this weighted black thought that Terry is becoming a dangerous partner. I feel this heavy blackness in the same place that Terry feels the tickle of God.

“That night at Herredia’s, just after dinner is served, Terry asks Herredia, old Felipe and me to bow our heads in prayer. Terry thanks the Lord for this great bounty and for the great friendships that have sprung up between us. He asks that the food be blessed for His service, and he concludes grace in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior, amen. Then, all through the meal he talks about his personal relationship with Jesus and he inquires directly into the health of each man’s soul. He says he will gladly witness to the Lord for us when we are ready. He refers to Laurel several times as the woman who has saved him through Christ. When dinner is over I look at Herredia. El Tigre has the same dark glower that he had the very first night we met him, you know, where he’s deciding not whether to kill someone, but how.”

“You guys are in trouble.”

“But listen. The next day we take Herredia’s fishing boat out of Ensenada and speed southwest. It’s a twin-engine Bertram fifty-eight-footer with outriggers and bait tanks-tournament rigged and ready. The engines have just a few dozen hours, Herredia tells us, but that was about all he said. He’s angry and it shows.

“And my other problem is I don’t fish. Never did it as a boy, never did it as a man. I don’t care about fish unless it’s on a menu. But, as you remember, I’d sold Terry and myself to El Tigre with gifts of fishing gear, some of which I’d personally endorsed. You know, the international brotherhood of anglers. So, when I begin to see that Herredia will want to take us fishing someday, I go out a couple of times on a half-day boat out of Long Beach, try to learn something about it.

“Now I have to call upon all of my acting skills to play the part of a seasoned saltwater angler. The postures and language of the sport come easily to me, but it takes more than ’tude and lingo to select, tie on and work a lure well enough to fool a wild animal. I concentrate on the fishing like I’ve never concentrated on anything in my life, except maybe seducing women, and I stay within my capabilities and I start catching some smaller fish. I can’t believe it! Herredia, of course, he sees that I’m not really very good but that’s perfect for him-he ridicules me and puts me in my place, does the whole macho trip you’d expect from a guy like that. But the fish quit biting my lures, and I start to feel the first shivers of panic at being unmasked. What if Herredia sees how deeply I’d been lying when I gave him all the fishing tackle? My guts start to ache. I start messing up my casts, getting tangles and knots. My confidence vanishes. I dig a hook into my damned thumb and pry it out and try to fish through the pain, but I still can’t get so much as a sardine to bite. Even way down in the water, the fish sense my incompetence. I catch Herredia staring at my middle section and I wonder if he’s thinking shotgun or the fillet knife I saw Felipe sharpening early that morning. I’m fucked.

“Then? Well, then Terry Laws starts doing something that Terry Laws turns out to be very, very good at. He fishes. Terry is fast and fluent with the knots, he can cast hundreds of feet of line with the flick of a wrist, he’s a wizard with the squid jigs, and when it comes time to set a hook his big arms pull the rod back smoothly and quickly and not a single fish-not even a dorado weighing thirty pounds-breaks his line or rejects his hook. He’s all over the Bertram. Every time I look up, there’s Terry, hooked up, rod bent, line screaming out as a big fish takes it to the depths. Then he’s hustling along the high gunwale, trying to keep his line from tangling with the others and his fish from getting under the boat, sliding on the wet deck, slipping, righting himself. I know that if Terry goes over he’ll probably drown before we get him back up, but this fact doesn’t deter Laws one bit.

“So of course it’s Terry’s troll line that gets hit. He runs to the stern and grabs the rod and sets the hook and settles into the fighting chair. He braces his legs and draws back the rod into an acute bend, then bows to the fish, reels in a few feet of line, and pulls up tight to it again. I’m cheering while Laws fights this animal. After twenty minutes he’s sweating hard and his total line gain can’t be more than fifty yards. But after half an hour the fish starts to give up line and Terry reels his heart out and then, about seventy-five yards off the port side, the striped marlin launches itself skyward and his flanks buckle and flex in the sunlight and he crashes back into the ocean in a silver explosion. Fifteen minutes later Felipe gaffs the fish and drags it onto the deck where it flops and hammers and tries to get that sword into somebody, the comb on its back raising and lowering, gills gaping slower and shallower. When the fish is dead Terry hefts it in his arms for pictures, taken by Herredia himself. I’ve never seen him so just plain happy. The marlin weighs in at one hundred and seventy-nine pounds.”

“So Terry saves himself by fishing?”

“Don’t interrupt. That night back at El Dorado, Terry breaks his own alcohol ban and downs three double tequilas before dinner. He sways as we take our seats in the dining room, tries to blame it on the rolling of the boat. The women dine with us that night, a rarity in Herredia’s domain. They’re tastefully and expensively dressed and Terry compliments each one on her appearance. He says that Jesus loved prostitutes because they knew shame.

“After dinner, in the billiards room, we shoot no-slop eightball and we drink more. The stereo’s on and two of the women dance while the other two watch Under the Tuscan Sun. Terry pours a large glass of single malt and sits in a big leather armchair. It’s an old chair, seasoned by decades of use-Herredia’s use, of course-and Terry just plops right down in it and begins regaling the room with stories of the fishing day. He has to speak loudly to get above the stereo and the video. He talks about the faith necessary to believe that a fish will strike your lure. How it’s like making a woman fall in love with you. His next topic is what it’s like to kill a man, what it does to a soul. Ten minutes later his glass shatters on the tile after leaving a trail of liquid down his shirt and pants and Herredia’s good chair. He’s snoring.

“Oh yeah, I love the way this is shaping up. Herredia is leaning over the table to calculate a bank shot angle, and at the sound of the glass shattering he straightens and walks around the table to me. He taps my chest with the point of his cue stick, and it leaves a faint cloud of blue powder on my shirt. But his look surprises me. It isn’t the glower of boxed fury like the night before, but the soulful, sad expression that he had worn when he proposed the assassination of Hector and Camilla Avalos.

– It is over, he says quietly.

– Yes.

– Very dangerous.

– Carlos, you are correct in everything, but I ask you to give him one more chance.

– One more chance to do what?

– He’s not like this at home. But when he gets down here, he feels safe and brave and lucky. He thinks this is where he can fight his demons.

– Demons always win. He should not go where they are.

– I can guide him away from them.

– You said this before.

– Give the child a chance to be a man. Do it for our friendship.

– Coleman, you are not a fool, are you?

– No, sir.

– He was weak when you first came here. His hands were shaking when he tried to zip open the luggage on that very first night. Now all of him is shaking, not only his hands.

– You have my word. If I can’t get him to right himself, I know what has to be done.

– Consider: the desert all around us is waiting. He caught the best fish today. He is happy.

“I look over at the dancing women and the unconscious Terry and old Felipe sitting by the door with the shotgun leaned against the wall next to him. El Tigre has a stricken look, a look that tells me he already regrets what he’s about to do.

– He is yours.

– Thank you.

“I got Terry up early the next morning. I expected something-the sudden appearance of men I didn’t know, the racking of a slide, the metallic whisper of a blade clearing leather. But I made my muscles move and I loaded the car and I got Terry into the passenger seat and I drove away. We left El Dorado in the still darkness. There’s nothing darker than a Baja California night.”

The boy is nodding. His self-confidence is impossible to empty, even to diminish for more than just a moment.

“So this is also a tale of the foolishness of El Tigre,” he says.

I lean forward toward him. “I would lower the volume of my voice if I were you.”

He snorts but blushes. I love this boy.

“We’ve come to the part of the story where chaos has turned to opportunity, and opportunity has turned back into chaos. We’ve come to the part of the story where Terry Laws discovers the character of his own soul.”

“I’ll miss the drugs, sex and rock and roll.”

“There will still be plenty of that. Another cognac?”

“I’m blitzed.”

“Then I’ll continue the story on another night. It deserves more than a drunk audience. And of course, I want to talk to you about Kick.”

The boy looks at me as sharply as he can. His eyes are fine but I know his thoughts are out of focus. He has impressive powers of concentration and tolerance to alcohol but there are limits to every power on Earth.

“Okay,” he says. “Kick. That story deserves more than a drunk teller.”

“I look forward to meeting your woman.”

“Yes.”

“For anything good to happen to us, she has to know that she was here, with us, from the very beginning. She must be part of our foundation. We’ve talked about this.”

“See you then.”