The Ultimate Good Luck

2

THERE WERE PLENTY of edifying stories about the Oaxaca prisión. As many as there were parts of the body to get interested in. They began, once you told them, to have the appeal of dirty limericks. Each one was worse than the one before, but you kept listening indefinitely because of the pacing. There was the one about the American jockey with the big crank who fucked every whore that stumbled up the road from Animas Trujano, and came down eventually with a burning that made his testicles swell up and burst before a doctor could get inside. There was the one Sonny told him on his first visitor’s day about the kid from Beloit with an earache who died in two hours when whatever it was in his ear made connection with his brain. People committed suicide with crochet needles. The mayores in the “F” barracks beheaded their boyfriends and left them in their beds for days. But the story that interested Quinn was the Austrian woman whose husband was doing years for holding ten Bolivian aspirins on a DC-3 bound for Cancun. The man was an appliance-store owner and wasn’t healthy, and his wife flew from Vienna and visited him every day. And every day the matrons in the women’s precinct submitted her to the most intimate personal searches. And after a while, Sonny said, the woman began to come twice a day, in the morning and during siesta, when the matrons had more time, and then more often, until eventually the matrons got bored and wouldn’t search her unless she paid them. Otherwise they would pass her through to her husband. And the woman had long ago stopped being interested in him. It demonstrated, he thought, the way people adapted to circumstances when the circumstances went out of control. And it was in the spirit of things in Mexico. Mexico was like Vietnam or L.A., only more disappointing — a great trivial abundance of crap the chief effect of which wasn’t variety but sameness. And since you couldn’t remember the particulars from one day to the next, you couldn’t remember what to avoid and control. And the only consolation finally was that you didn’t have any stake in it, and Quinn didn’t figure to be around long enough to earn one.

Bernhardt drove the car intently, as though something was troubling him. They were out near the prisión on the American Highway driving too fast in Bernhardt’s Mercedes. The morning had developed a painful opaline glare, and out behind, Oaxaca had scaled back flat in the distance, a matte plate of jacarandas and palmeras and square-roofed casitas and the pale double corona of the Santo Domingo Cathedral, the clear dreamy Mexican air diminishing everything. Mexican cities at a distance, Quinn believed, gave you a different illusion from American cities. They looked like dream oases, whereas American cities looked like disassembled nightmares, but the facts were reversed and American cities were better places when you got there.

“Last night we have a large cocaine interception at the airport,” Bernhardt said. He looked concerned, as though the news disappointed him. “A shooting. One man, an American serviceman, is shot thirty times. The police even shoot each other in the excitement.” Bernhardt stared straight ahead, his hands firmly on top of the steering wheel.

They were well out of the city now on the broad reach of flat highway. It was precisely what he wanted to stay clear of, the periphery of things out of control. That was trouble. You had to stay center-on. There were a lot of second-class buses wallowing in the other way, old Flxibles with school coaches slop-painted red and white, jostling to pieces. And there were Indians lining the dusty roadside toward town. The Indians all walked with the same jaunty gait that made them look ambitious. “In Mexico,” Bernhardt continued, “to obey the law is always to avoid it. If police are shot, then guerrillas are accused. Then the law comes to every place. And if guerrillas are accused, then there are more guerrillas to locate.” He glanced at the Indians the car was passing. “Many people don’t know they’re guerrillas before the police say so. But they begin to act that way as soon as they find out.” Bernhardt shrugged.

“That’s real tough,” Quinn said.

“Perhaps it won’t matter to you now,” Bernhardt said confidently. “Your wife arrives this afternoon?”

“That’s the plan,” Quinn said.

“And she will have everything?”

Bernhardt meant the money. “She’ll have it.”

“Then it will be smooth,” Bernhardt said.

“That’s what I want,” Quinn said. “No spectacles.”

When Rae had split he had started doing what they used to call winter camping. Finnish lunacy. He had driven in the Scout north of Antrim on the fifteenth of January, built a basswood platform for his tent, and begun to concentrate attention on the Ojibwas. He drove the corduroy roads and the pine slashes with his.336 across his lap and a chambered round, until he saw their cars, bricked down in the trunk, snugged in with dead falls across the hoods, old rusted Nashes and Studebaker trucks with the headlights blacked. He’d drive out at midnight with his lights off, secure the road with the Scout, and snowshoe up, following their narrow trail until he could hear voices. Then he’d circle out so that he came down on them from deeper in the woods where they weren’t expecting anything. He had perfected the ability to travel silently, and so he would catch them stark in his seal beam over a doe, smoking dope and stashing the sawed parts in black garbage bags to sled back to the cars. The Ojibwas called it high-speed beef, and it was a trick to plank a salt lick in a forked tree and let the deer work it through until they were leaning in to get at the last wafer crust when the larch stakes that formed a funnel to the salt caught them behind the neck and held them until the Ojibwas arrived in the trucks at night with their chain saws and cruiser axes. Sometimes the deer would freeze to death, and sometimes they’d rupture the big artery in their necks from bucking. But mostly they’d stand still and breathe until the men came softly up with their flashlights, saws, and garbage bags and cut their throats and bled them while the men sat and rolled a joint and waited for the carcasses to drain out. He caught twenty Indians the first month and the word began to spread around. He’d put the cuffs on them and walk them out to the road, set them in the back of the Scout, then drive the deer to the county locker and the Ojibwas to the Federal Marshall in Traverse City who fined them a hundred and turned them loose. He caught the same men again and again, and it got to be a joke. But he had the time, and he couldn’t sleep two straight hours in the tent, and the Ojibwas never hassled, and there wasn’t anything else to do until spring.

The terrain now was high-mountain cordillera, pleated and folded into a long blind valley of brown unclassified earth turning chalk green downrange and curling toward the higher peaks like sandpaper. Once in a while, you could make out a red tower pricked above the palm plats in the tiny distant pueblos, but the land itself was degraded and upended. It was not the kind of landscape he liked. Not a complex landscape. The light was too clear and unvarying. In the States these mountains would have names, but here the sense of permanence was expressed differently, by an anonymity that made you aware of seeing only half a mountain, as if the other side could all be painted orange.

The people on the road were all Zapotecs carrying bound woolens and water tins into the mercado. Now and then a group of children danced at the edge of the road dangling iguanas on strings. The iguanas stroked slowly in the air while the children flailed them at the cars, but all Quinn could hear, fading, were cries that sounded like “good-bye, good-bye.”

“If he had not signed a confession,” Bernhardt said, “it would be easier now.” He cleared his throat. “If he was braver.”

“He wouldn’t be our boy then,” Quinn said. Something about Sonny’s name made Bernhardt uncomfortable. He never spoke it. “So what do you do with a fucking iguana?” He looked back at the children traipsing away from the road toward a bombed-out adobe with no roof. It was never verifiable if most Mexican houses were half finished or half torn down.

“Set them loose,” Bernhardt said authoritatively. He paused a moment. “Sometimes I buy one.” He smiled in a comradely way. “And then I set it loose down the carretera. What could I do with it?”

Quinn faced the road again. “Let ’em keep it,” he said. “Just pay off.”

“They don’t want iguanas.” Bernhardt shook his head. “They are a nuisance. Why would they want them more than you do?”

Bernhardt was the Mexican lawyer he had paid to get Rae’s brother out of the prisión. He had gotten on to Bernhardt through the consulate, who said Bernhardt had had success with American druggies, had reliable principles, and wasn’t cheap. Bernhardt liked Americans and smiled a lot and seemed to have good connections with the administración de justicia. He was the best you could do. He reminded Quinn of the U.S.I.A. officers he had seen in the war, expensive suits, slightly balding, and a positive temperance that made you want to trust him. At best he figured Bernhardt wasn’t bored enough to get involved if there wasn’t a chance to buy Sonny out.

Bernhardt said he had a judge ready in two nights to execute a document of release for ten thousand dollars, and Rae was bringing cash on Mexicana in the afternoon. Bernhardt wanted to know nothing about money until the moment he needed it, and today they were simply making the drive as though nothing was going down, to let Sonny know he was leaving. If the human flow changed or if an insider got down in his Super Plenamins and smokes, word moved that a release was coming and everybody lined up for a handout. But if the release went off fast only the alcaide had to be paid, and that was it. It was going to be necessary to purchase the official document of release in the afternoon, and then get Rae, which was what Quinn was waiting for and the only stake he figured he had in anything.

Ahead, the army had arranged a new checkpoint on both sides of the road, with two sandbagged M-60s and plenty of help. Bernhardt stopped back of the barricade, showed his driver’s license and his prisión card, and was passed through. The soldier looked at Quinn through the window but didn’t check.

Beyond the barricade on the opposite shoulder a line of second-class buses waited in the dust to be inspected, swagged to the side with passengers going to market day tomorrow, bundles and baskets piled on top and all the greasy windows filled with attentionless Zapotec faces, staring out at the highway. The soldiers were making everyone in the first bus stand out and haul their belongings off the top-carry and open them. More soldiers watched from under the plank hut while the searchers cruised through the Indian passengers, pointing at bundles and yelling to make the women raise their dresses while the men stood awkwardly with their arms up. Quinn thought about Rae having to raise her skirt for soldiers. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. In the waiting buses people were dropping fruit peels out the windows, and as the car eased down the line a pig’s face peered out a window all alone.

“Pistols and explosivos,” Bernhardt said very professionally. He steered casually along the row of buses without watching the searches. “Storms come, and birds can’t fly to the sea, you know?” He smiled.

Quinn stared at the pig’s impudent face. “Do they find any?”

“No,” Bernhardt said confidently. “But they arrest for appearances. In United States, people respect money. But in Mexico, only soldiers. Tuesday you see nothing here. Last night an interception and today there are soldiers. Things could become difficult.”

“I’ll just count on you to stay clear of those difficulties.”

“I hope it is possible,” Bernhardt said.

Back in the line a red Dodge van was waiting for inspection. It had good tires and a gold university door seal. Inside were three rows of American college girls all talking at once and looking out the dusty windows at the front of the line. The driver was a Mexican tired of putting up with horseshit. He wasn’t going to get fucked, and he wanted out of the sun. Quinn watched the girls go by. He wondered which ones would have to pull down their jeans for the soldiers and what they would tell whoever was paying for the trip. It was going to be an adventure.

“It can quickly become a time for responsible laws now,” Bernhardt said and shook his head gravely. Bernhardt had big square incisors that were always moist. But he didn’t show them now. “Mordida is a source of irritation,” he said. “Like guerrillas. You do not have guerrillas in the United States. You are lucky.”

“We live right, I guess,” Quinn said, watching the valleyscape open like a fan.

“Perhaps one day. American cities invite it,” Bernhardt said significantly.

“I’m in the here and now,” Quinn said. “I can’t worry about that.”

Bernhardt looked at him seriously. “But you are in this now, Mr. Quinn. So you should know it intimately.” Bernhardt glanced at the mirror and at the highway narrowing into the desert. Bernhardt liked heavy-duty comparisons, and he wasn’t stupid about it, but some just didn’t hold your attention as well as others. Bernhardt could make you impatient. “A man wants to give his wife a life so pleasing nothing in it wouldn’t remind her of him. You see.” Bernhardt looked at him seriously. “Is that not right?”

“It beats me.” It was the orthodox lie Mexican men told themselves to make themselves feel like gods on earth. It was shabby, but everybody believed it.

“It is true,” Bernhardt said firmly and drew a breath. “But the guerrillas are like a man whose wife fucks everybody but him and there’s nothing he can do. He never pleases. He is never pleased. So he robs banks, shoots soldiers, blows up, sells narco, disparages everything. And everyone is displeased. And if your wife’s brother traffics narco then he is like a guerrilla, an irritation, and people do not want to do a favor for him.” Bernhardt turned and watched the highway glide by with satisfaction.

“Love’s a hardship, right?” Quinn said.

Bernhardt looked at him as if they understood one another perfectly. “Exactly,” he said, pleased. “It smells always of extinction.”

“It’s a sweet smell, though, isn’t it?” Quinn said.

“Ahh,” Bernhardt said, and smiled to show his incisors. “It is a sweet smell. There’s nothing like it. But it is extinction just the same.”

In a different setup, he thought he might’ve found a way to like Bernhardt, only the setup didn’t include that now. Intimacy just made things hard to see, and he wanted things kept highly visible at all times.

Animas Trujano centered on a low dry spot of highway with the big state prisión segregated above it by a long sandstone fault that gave the town the appearance of having been toppled off a more necessary layer of the earth. The village was a randy collection of tan and aquamarine thatch huts built along a mud alley that retailed whores and mescal to the prison, and a Zapotec herb market built under a long twig awning where the Indians bought Sidra and traded peyote buttons. Plenty of times he had seen moms and dads from Illinois standing out in the dirt alleys in their clean pastel suits and summer dresses, holding care parcels in both arms while the whores taunted them from the doorways of the little one-room chozas. Sometimes one of the smiling moms waved as if she saw something she recognized in his wide American face. But mostly they just stared up the highway in amazement as their cab left, as if they had been dropped backward into the worst dream they’d ever dreamed. Both his parents were dead, and thinking about the people lost on the streets of Animas Trujano made his situation seem worse, and he wanted to keep his spirits up, and the way to do that was not to see yourself as anything but yourself.

The prisión was a rhomboid made out of yellow sandstone behind a tall chain fence. There were metal guard turrets and gimbal lights at each corner and guards were conspicuous behind the windows and on the walls. From the highway approaching Animas Trujano you could see a high, red safe-box building inside with long low buildings connected like spokes. On top of the safe-box was a transmitter tower with a red slogan light, and beside it a copter pad slash-marked H. It was the most single-minded piece of construction he had ever seen, and from outside it was inconceivable that men were in it and that more men got put in it every day. It would refute something basic in you, Quinn thought, to be put inside. And so of course there wouldn’t be any extremes beyond consideration to getting yourself out.

In Animas Trujano the whores weren’t up yet. Portieres hung over their entries, though the doors to the mescalerías had been opened and green candles were already twitching inside. There were no moms and dads today and the town seemed inert and passed over. A Zapotec boy riding a bicycle flocked with wads of white cotton rode up the street against the direction of the car, followed by a dog, and there was a group of men standing beside an old green Impala that had crapped out in the middle of the street. Their heads were under the hood, and one pair of legs sprouted out into the strong sunlight. The boy seemed to be riding away from them.

“Mexican men either work on their cars or piss,” Quinn said as the Chevy came up.

Bernhardt didn’t answer. He took a black pistol from under his jacket and put it in a space beneath the dash. Bernhardt had on a beige Italian suit, something, Quinn thought, you’d have to go a long way for. It made its own statement. “Maybe you should carry a gun,” Bernhardt said. The boy on the bicycle waved as he pedaled past. “If you smell extinction,” Bernhardt said appraisingly, “it maybe comes closer to you.”

“I can’t smell it,” Quinn said.

“But you do.” Bernhardt looked at him. “You are alone, that is detestable. Your wife is making you nervous now. So it scares you somehow, maybe.”

“Not me,” he said and looked at Bernhardt. “I was in the war. I don’t get scared anymore. It’s my big problem.”

“Then you are lucky,” Bernhardt said. He made the turn toward the prisión. He was silent for a moment. “Too many things scare me anymore. Too many things are to be afraid of.”

“You’re all loaded up though,” Quinn said, pointing toward the gun. “Just stay between me and them.”

“You may need to be close, though, before we’re finished.” Bernhardt attended the road carefully as it approached the fenced perimeter of the prison. There were soldiers and army police standing in groups on the inside of the fence and a brand new APC in front of the main gate with another sixty caliber podded on a truck bed. The soldiers stared at the car casually as if it made an uninteresting noise they had nothing better to do than identify.

“Just lay it all out for me so I can see it,” Quinn said. He felt aggressive all at once. The prison made him alert, and that was the way he wanted to stay, alert to everything. “I like to be able to see everything when I do it.”

“Maybe it will all please you,” Bernhardt said.

Quinn glanced out at the yellow stone wall of the prison. It was long enough that at any one location you had no sense of there being an end to it. “I’d like to be pleased,” he said. “It would be a real fucking experience.”