The Ultimate Good Luck

4

THE HIGH MOUNTAIN on the west valleyside had lost the sun and blackened down to the color of green without light. In the winter, chaparral fires blossomed in the steep inclines and defiles, hanging a mask of haze to the terminus of the valley. The fire burned for weeks, and people stopped noticing it, and after a while the smoke just became part of the landscape. It was, Quinn thought, the way you got yourself used to everything. It was like imagination, and then it was the way things were. And then you couldn’t tell the difference.

“So how do we find this guy?” he said. Rae would be here too soon and things weren’t falling out just right.

“It won’t be difficult.” Bernhardt adjusted his glasses with his thumb and fingers, then squinted over the steering wheel toward Monte Albán, clear in the open distance west, where there were still morning light windows on the precipices. Bernhardt was driving fast, “What would your wife’s brother do for money?” he said calmly.

“Nothing that big,” Quinn said. “He couldn’t lay off that much.”

“He could mail it to an apartado in the States, a dummy.” Bernhardt seemed to enjoy the speculation.

“He’s too little.”

“A great deal of trouble can be caused by little liars. You understand?” Bernhardt looked at him appraisingly.

“No way,” he said. “He doesn’t have a big imagination.”

Bernhardt fastened his eyes back on the highway. “Then we will have to impress the other man,” he said. “Mr. Deats. I will have to find a way to do that.”

“What happens meantime?” His mind was on Rae. It was too late to call her in Texas. She’d be out of the motel already.

“We will purchase the document of release,” Bernhardt said evenly. “I will go on with the arrangements to the judge. You will meet your wife. Things will go as we planned them. We can’t worry about Mr. Deats. It is a delicate situation.”

They were approaching the army spec station from the opposite direction. More buses sat queued on the dusty shoulder wheezing smoke. Soldiers were busy on top of the lead coach throwing boxes and bundles on the ground while the Indians stood passively with their arms over their heads. The red travel van that had been in the queue before was parked beside the station hut with all its windows broken and its seats pulled out. None of the girls was around anymore. They were Americans, but there was nothing he could do for them, and it gave him a cold bone feeling to wonder where they were and what they were getting to look at next.

Bernhardt pulled out around the buses to center highway, idled to the barricade, showed his license, and was passed.

“In twenty years,” he said when he had gained speed, “Mexico will be governed by defectives, the children of these people.” He motioned backward toward the campesinos standing in the dirt for search. There was a profound sympathy that rivaled distaste in his voice. But it was tone and no substance. “They are fed on garbage. And one day nothing will please them anymore.” He reached under the dash, removed the pistol, and put it back under his coat. “And then you and I will have a big problem.”

“It doesn’t worry me much.” Quinn said. He thought about his own pistol in the bungalow, and Bernhardt’s advice to carry it. It wasn’t smart.

“Why?” Bernhardt said and smiled, as though all the alternatives were amusing.

“Because if that time comes and I’m alive, I won’t be right here.”

“Where will you be?” Bernhardt said.

“Far away from here.”

“One never knows,” Bernhardt said, letting himself be distracted again by the mountains, visible only as a black mass in the west.

“Oh yeah,” Quinn said. “One knows that. One knows that for sure.”

He wondered precisely where, down the line, Bernhardt would bolt. He knew he would somewhere, and he wanted to anticipate it, so that when Bernhardt hit out, there’d be one more option left for himself and Rae. One was enough. He watched a white helicopter skimming the blue air to the east, out of hearing, its tail strung up as if a fine, invisible filament was hauling it on. It was nuts, he thought, to be tied to somebody, two counting Bernhardt, you had no feeling about, but who somehow made all the difference. That was the essence of the modern predicament. The guy who had it in for you was the guy you’d never seen. The one you loved was the one you couldn’t be understood by. The one you paid to trust was the one you were sure would cut and run. The best you could think was maybe you’d get lucky, and come out with some skin left on.