The Ultimate Good Luck

21

TWO WOMEN SAT in the Portal de Flores, drinking beers and talking in the blue fluorescence. They looked like English women. Something in the way they sat in their chairs, too straight, holding their beers with their fingers extended. The Centro was empty except for a few police and the soldiers in campaign coats shadowing the street corners. As they passed it, Quinn peered in through the pink, Moorish arches of the Monte Albán, where they would be in an hour. He thought, for some reason, he might see Deats there. Lights inside were blue and filmy, and he could see into the atrium, the skeletal dining tables set in lines. Nobody moved and there was nothing else to see.

“I need to telephone,” Bernhardt said in a businesslike way. “Then I drive to get your luggage.”

Bernhardt didn’t notice the soldiers. He turned past the university buildings up Cinco de Mayo and rolled noisily up the cobbles.

The streetlights here were pale and gauzy. A dim, prestorm clarity froze the façades and made the sky flat and seamless. There were no cars on the street and no one was walking. When the Mercedes stopped, the street was silent and Quinn listened for sounds in either direction and heard nothing until the air softly began a low sibilance that covered everything, like the night expiring.

“Momentito,” Bernhardt said. He smiled at Rae on the seat, and got out. He unlatched the steel shutters on his office, pushed up the door, and walked inside, switching on the lights.

The rooster and the carne carbón were gone. A scrim of papers was wadded against the façade, with the rock that had kept the rooster in its place used to hold the papers down. He watched Bernhardt at his desk, dialing the phone, looking silently out at the car. He could remember catching a frog in the saw grass along the Boardman River and bringing it home while his mother slept and letting it sit a long time in a pan of water on the back porch of the first house his father rented when they left the farm. He let the frog stay in the pan until late afternoon, when the frog had accustomed itself to the house air and grown calm. And when the frog stopped paddling and began to sit still for minutes at a time, he carried the pan in the house and down the hall to the kitchen and set it on the gas and lit the ring at the lowest flutter of flame and stood beside the stove and waited. The water in the pan began to heat at once, though the flame was low and the change was gradual. The frog sat in the water and looked up at him calmly and didn’t move. And little by little, he turned the knob and watched the flame fatten and turn bluer and the frog sit in the warming water looking out, blinking and breathing, though never moving, until suddenly a fizz sparked the edge of the water, and he saw that the frog would sit and stare out past the time when it could move even if it needed to, and he took the pan off the flame and held it under the kitchen tap and watched the frog blink and blink, its mouth opening a little and closing, beginning to paddle about until it could escape if the danger was from drowning and not from boiling. He thought later the frog in the pan was an illustration of how people let certain things they’re used to go on so long that they don’t know that the things they’re used to are killing them. And he wondered now, sitting in Bernhardt’s car, just when that point exactly was, and how you knew when it was close to you, and in the rare event you did know or could guess right, just what you did to keep yourself from getting burned.

A campesino turned the corner two blocks up Cinco de Mayo and started slowly down the hill toward the Centro. He was a small man in duck pants and a straw hat woven to give the brim a deep-swept country flange. He watched the man, noticed the way his feet moved near the ground, his gait regular and effortless as if he was accustomed to walking long distances. The man reminded him of the farmer with the goat in the palacio court the day before.

In the office Bernhardt had begun speaking into the telephone, watching the open door, his eyes moving. He picked up the letter opener and held it by the blade while he talked. There was no way to guess at the call, or its importance. It could be something else, and Quinn looked back at the campesino, who had crossed the Avenue Absalo and stopped under a lamp, gazing back up Cinco de Mayo as if he was searching for an address he had lost. The campesino had a rough beard, but his shoulders were loose and his head was erect and he was young. He stood in the streetlight ten meters ahead of the Mercedes, peering disconsolately back up into the darkness of the avenue, and Quinn could hear again, then, the low sibilance in the street, the soft ventral suspiration of any city, Chicago in the blue morning. Detroit deserted at the moment the sun set. It was the sound of sleep, and it put you at ease.

The campesino started suddenly toward the Centro, his sandals slapping the pavement quickly, though as he came in front of Bernhardt’s office his head turned as if he’d been surprised by the light, and his hands seemed to move excitedly under his poncho. There was a sudden loud expectoration of noise then, and the campesino was wrenched forward barging into the open door. The view to the office became lost then, but the light licked out either side of the man, printing him in the doorway as if he had stepped behind a shade. Quinn yelled into the whacking of the machine gun, but the campesino seemed to get smaller and kept the gun pointed in the office the entire time. There was a fountain of metal shot away from the man’s body, and then suddenly it stopped. And for a moment, almost a leisurely moment, there was no movement and no sounds anywhere, and it was as though what had happened, something he hadn’t even seen or been sure of, hadn’t happened, and everything remained the way it had been just a moment before.

Rae was crawling across the back seat on her knees, trying to reach the floor. He grabbed her head, losing his breath, and caught her front and back and squeezed until he could feel movement go back in a shudder down her spine. He put his face in her face and shook his head no. Rae’s eyes were large and expanding, her hair was falling around his hands, but she understood and went limp.

When he looked back the campesino was up Cinco de Mayo running toward the streetlight. He turned the corner onto the Avenue Absalo, where he had stopped a minute ago in the light, and disappeared. On the pavement there was half a gun of some kind with a long clip out the side and no stock, something Quinn imagined at that moment would be very hard to fire well. It had a length of cord tied to the barrel and the trigger guard, and it was rocking back and forth on the clip butt. There was a heavy odor of eggs fried too long on dry metal. And the time seemed to pass in a kind of dreamy slowness. Bernhardt was still inside the office, though the light there seemed much brighter and the air in the street too warm. Bernhardt had moved from where he had been. He was against the back wall and to the right, nearly out of the door frame. His pistol was lying in the middle of the floor in front of the clients’ chairs. His shirt was torn across the front and he was bleeding onto his arms. His face seemed unperturbed, but he was lying in a strange leg-over-hip position that Quinn recognized, and that no one who was alive would try to maintain. Bernhardt’s hand was tapping the tile floor spastically, but that movement didn’t mean anything.

He had squeezed Rae’s face until it was cold and there was a heavy faintness on her he could smell and that suddenly seemed suffocating. He shoved her up and toward the car door and said, “Out, get out,” and began struggling to get himself into the street.

Time seemed to speed up then, and he felt the need for cover. He thought he had at the most a minute, and then there would be no more chances.

Rae’s lips were pressed tightly against her teeth, and she seemed heavy and in danger of falling down. She hadn’t spoken, and he turned her toward Absalo in the direction the campesino had run, and where there were no sounds in the street and no motion up the flat façades. He couldn’t make himself think of Bernhardt, though he thought a lot would come to him later and that everything was changed beyond retrieval. Below them, the Centro lay in a smear of lights and trees, and beyond that above the buildings he could see the blue Corona Cerveza globe shining on the still night. Anyone who saw them now, he thought, would know where they came from, and it would be over.

“Don’t run,” he said. He reached back in the car, got his pistol, held Rae under the arm and shoved her. He took a last look at Bernhardt. He was small on the office floor. His glasses were on his face, but his shoes were off him as if he’d been blown completely out of them. The telephone was replaced in the cradle, and the wall behind where he had stood was unmarked. The campesino had hit him with every round he fired and only stopped when there wasn’t enough left to shoot at. It was skilled work, something Bernhardt wouldn’t have expected.

Far up Cinco de Mayo there were headlights. They startled him because they were coming against the traffic, and at a speed only the police would come.

They reached the corner of Absalo, and Rae continued walking out into the intersection. Her eyes were fixed and wide and she made an attempt to pull him.

“Just do what I tell you,” he said, and jerked her backward. She looked at him, her eyes beginning to move a little, but her mouth still against her teeth. He thought for an instant she was going to speak, but then saw that she couldn’t and that it was not speaking that kept her on her feet. He looked back at Bernhardt’s office — the Mercedes, the doorway bleeding light, the gun alone on the pavement, and the casings still rolling down the gutter — and he was almost for an instant overcome with a giddy thought-erasing fear that he was going to die and it would be the wrong time for it.

The Avenue Absalo was dark, though there were regular stanchions lighting each corner block after block. The street was a comercial with pink and pale blue adobe façades. A sweet bakery smell floated in the street, and Quinn scanned the storefronts but nothing was unfamiliar and there were no alleys or cars parked, and no one was visible down the street except a man at the first corner in the oval of pale light, smoking.

Rae was walking stiffly and beginning not to breathe right, and she suddenly groaned in her chest. The man in the light looked at her but didn’t move except to transfer his cigarette from his hand to his mouth. Quinn heard the liquid murmur of tires on bricks behind him, but he didn’t want to look back. He stuck his pistol in his pants pocket, and held Rae more tightly.

As they approached under the light, the man looked over his shoulder, and Quinn saw he was the man who had shot Bernhardt. His features were the ones he had watched down the street a long way. The man’s hair was across his forehead, and the poncho was gone and he was barefoot. When they came near him, the man turned and raised his hand and touched the brim of a hat he wasn’t wearing and bowed slightly at the waist. He whispered something softly, the sound of a bee caught in a glass. The man was not out of his teens, and Quinn had the impulse to shoot him in the neck once and pay Bernhardt off for not bolting. The car coming against the traffic drifted noiselessly past the intersection. Quinn looked but it was not a police van, and then they were past the man at the light, looking onto the Avenue Juárez, which was masked and anonymous all the way down the hill toward the vapor lights in the Centro.

When they had walked ten meters, close to the store windows, Rae began to shake and then stopped walking. Her breathing became deep and quickened, and she sucked her tongue and pushed her head to the side as if she was going to be sick. He held her and pressed her shoulders against the window glass, and put his face close to hers for a long time, trying to join her breathing to his breathing, and calm her, staring through the cheap pane into an empty barbershop, at the chair and the white walls and the mirrors where he could see his reflection. And then by degrees he heard the soft suspiring night sigh of the city begin again, and Rae became erect and cool in his arms, and he could smell her breath hot and not sweet, and for a moment, with her close to him, his cheek on the cold glass, he felt himself fully located for once, and in a world in which time couldn’t pass.