The Ultimate Good Luck

22

THEY WAITED INSIDE the shooting arcade behind the Juárez Market. Teenagers were packed in, playing the games, drinking the mescal, and yelling. There was the anxious smell of pomade and the shabby, mesmerizing drowse of small chances being taken. Quinn stood at a machine on which a tall smiling Negress in a red sari undressed as points went up, until only her red underpants were left and then they were gone and a cat’s face smiled in her crotch and lights flashed PUSSY, and the girl’s expression changed to an embarrassed O. He kept playing it until he couldn’t lose.

Rae sat on the wooden bench against the wall. Soldiers wandered in and stood in the door, lingering a moment considering her, then walked back outside.

At midnight Quinn came and sat beside her. The popping, clanging of the shooting games was loud and submerging, and he tried just for a moment to hold things in place. Luck was infatuated with efficiency. But he couldn’t work that trick now. He thought about driving into St. Louis, headed overseas, about the slow uneventful evening’s ease of time out of Illinois and verging on the realization of being nowhere at all that mattered. He took a room downtown and walked up Olive Street to where the sun was pink and gold, and the old brick warehouses relaxed in a deep, slumbrous shadow. He remembered perfectly buying a cigar and two quarts of beer in a paper sack and walking down in the dusk to see the Cards, all so that he could not think for a time about going to Vietnam. A pressure seemed released and an inevitability forged, and he thought about the day with longing. And his mind now seemed to want that and nothing else.

“I’m over my head,” Rae said, staring at the violet and yellow machines. Her voice was steady. She touched his hand with cold fingers.

“Let it go,” he said. “You’re flying out of here tomorrow.”

She seemed not to hear. “Do you know that man who killed him?”

“No,” Quinn said.

“Do you know who Carlos was calling?”

“I wouldn’t guess.”

She seemed removed from talk as if she was already gone. “Do we have any chances left?”

He stared at the Negress in her sari, waiting to be undressed. He wanted to play it again. “We’re not even in it,” he said.

“Can’t you see Zago?”

“I can’t think about him right now.”

“If you aren’t leaving …” she said and arranged her hands in her lap. “You used to say I made you feel lucky. Is that all gone now too?”

“I thought this was what I had to do to have you back.”

“That’s silly,” Rae said. “It just seemed convenient.”

He looked down the dark row of shooting games at the Mexican boys pouring money in. He reached in his pocket and felt his pistol. One of the children began banging on his machine and cursing in Spanish. The other players stopped and stared at him until he broke the glass on the machine. They all seemed fixed and detached in a pleasing way that made him want to stay in the gallery a long time.

“Let’s get out of here,” Rae said. “It reminds me of the dogs too much.”

There were no more taxis, and the buses had quit at midnight. He led Rae up the Twentieth of November Street through the vegetable stands behind the market toward the zócalo. The street-lamps were off and a foreign blue light misted the air, stars pale and bristling above the alley openings. It made his mind clear. The Christmas lights were still lit in the zócalo, but the cafés in the Portal were shut and the metal tables stacked inside. He walked her across the empty park with his arm around her shoulders. The Baskin-Robbins had been boarded and the soldiers patrolling the Centro were inattentive or asleep on their feet.

The dining tables he had seen from Bernhardt’s car were still lined across the hotel atrium. The clerk stood behind the high desk listening to a radio and rolling dice with himself. He looked at them as though he’d seen them before but didn’t care. Quinn said in Spanish that there was a room and he wanted it. The clerk’s look became drowsy, and he fingered a file in a drawer, then pulled a card. He studied the card awhile, as if he was trying to find what was wrong with it, then he smiled at Rae and laid the card on the desk top.

“No hay matrimoniales,” he said proudly.

“What’s that mean?” Rae said.

“No double beds.” Quinn signed and gave the card back, waiting for the key.

“He thinks I’m a whore,” she said and smiled at the clerk. “It must be these heels.”

“It’s a boring job,” Quinn said, and put the key in his pocket.

The room was hot and full of flies and smelled like old laundry. Rae opened the window and stood for a moment looking without talking, as though she saw something in the distance over the low prospect of town that reassured her. Quinn pulled the transom, put his gun in the bureau drawer, and sat on the one wooden chair and watched the flies being soothed past Rae into the open night. In a while she took off her dress and lay on the bed beside the window in her white bra and underpants and the necklace he’d given her, and shut her eyes. Quinn turned on the bathroom light and checked the shower for scorpions, but there weren’t any. He thought about the money up in the bungalow, but there was nothing he could do. It would keep there unless someone tore down the house. He washed his hands and walked back in the room.

Rae had begun to breathe steadily, her hair wide and deep red against the white covers.

He sat in the chair and watched her. He hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, and hadn’t had a pill in twelve. He was stronger than he thought he’d be and straight-headed. He watched Rae breathe until he heard steps in the hall approaching the room. Someone coughed, a man’s voice, then keys jingled. He heard a lock fall, then the steps grew farther away and a door closed. He thought about Bernhardt, with every bullet in him as though he had danced to catch them all. He wondered if Cinco de Mayo was blocked off with trucks flashing lights, and soldiers sealing off the sidewalks. He imagined separate faces, Zago and Deats, but they seemed to lose ground irretrievably and be replaced by a vista over pale grey water, at the perimeter of which tiny dots didn’t move, like boats too far out to picture. Bernhardt’s absence made him feel marooned close to the clean, satisfied edge of exhausted possibility, beyond affection or sorrow, the stalemate edge of all losses, the point where time froze on whatever was present, and nothing could be longed for or feared or protected against, where luck was not the thing you played. It was the best luck there was. He might’ve liked Bernhardt, he thought, if he’d known him somewhere else. He had liked Bernhardt not always telling the truth, and not lying, and not leaving when he could’ve left. But that was it. He’d see Sonny one more time because he still had the responsibility to console. But he didn’t love Sonny. And sometime in the afternoon he’d get on the plane with Rae, then that would be all that mattered anymore, an intimacy that didn’t need an outside frame.

Rae stirred in the bed. Her legs parted and she moved on her side. Time seemed to expand around him and expectancy subsided. He sat beside her on the bed and listened to her breathe and watched her as though she was the only thing he could see. He put his cheek on her side and felt the firm hits of her life. Her flesh seized, and he knew she was cold, and he lay beside her in his clothes and put his arms around her and held her to try to make her warm.