Mystery Girl: A Novel (28 page)

“Hey, gringa,” they called. “Hey, puta, come here.”

The skinny dude with the vest and chains got up and blocked her way. His trucker hat was on sideways now, in a B-boy-style or just from drunkenness, and he grabbed her wrist as she passed. She pulled back, trying to laugh it off and walk around him. He blocked her again. Ramón stood.

“Oiga, amigo,”
he called over, sounding reasonable if firm, but the
fat trucker stood up and faced him. He was even bigger and fatter and uglier than he seemed sitting down. Bright boils throbbed like sirens on his forehead and neck.

Red alert! Things suddenly looked very bad, and with the other two males in our party old and/or blind, I realized it was incumbent upon me to get my ass kicked for Nic’s dubious honor. I stood reluctantly and gripped the neck of a beer bottle, completely forgetting there was still beer in it.

“Hey, cabrón,” I called out as I tried to wield the bottle bar-brawler-style, and the contents splattered over me and my friends. There was a dead moment as everyone, including me, stared. Then the fat trucker burst into laughter. His friend joined in, along with Ramón and Coffee, and even Blind Uncle, though how could he get the joke? I tried to smile disarmingly. Meanwhile, Nic pulled away from the creepy trucker, but he grabbed her arm hard. The fat trucker stopped laughing.

“Pinche cabrón,”
he said to me. “I’m going to take that bottle and cut your little white balls off.”

Ramón made fists, the bartender ducked, and everyone was bracing for battle, when the crack of a shot erupted, so loud and so close that I didn’t understand what was happening when the skinny trucker’s cap jumped off his head like a frightened bird. He looked around, eyes wide in terror, as if his own hat had betrayed him. I froze, afraid to even turn my head, afraid to blink. Everyone froze, except for Ramón—he pulled his gun, a flat automatic, and poked it into the fat one’s gut. Then we all looked to see from whence the shot had come. Blind Uncle was holding a huge revolver, its mouth still steaming, aimed right at Skinny, although Blind Uncle himself was kind of staring off to the side at empty space. It was like his ear was cocked.

Ramón spoke loudly in Spanish, then threw some crumpled bills on the bar and said, “We’re leaving. And you can all drink in peace. Just as soon as the señora uses the restroom.”

“That’s fine,” Nic said. “I don’t have to go anymore.”

“All right then, after you,” he told her. We all filed out, with Ramón and Blind Uncle in the rear. As we left, the mustachioed dude in the corner, smiling now and puffing a cigar, graciously tipped his hat.

“Holy fucking shit!” Nic yelled as we scooted to the car. “How the hell did he do that?”

“My uncle?” Ramón got the taxi going and steered us onto the road. “He’s a master marksman. He doesn’t need to see anymore. He can hear like a bat and sense movement and even feel the air currents and temperature with his face. Right?”

His Uncle nodded in agreement.
“Sí, sí.”

“But he shot the hat right off his head!” I said.

“I did?” Blind Uncle asked me.

“Hell yes, you did.”

He chuckled. “Lucky shot.”

73

RAMÓN PARKED IN FRONT
of the hotel and escorted us in, greeting the proprietor and explaining that we were his friends in a way that politely assured both our safety and our surveillance. Still, it had its plus side: when Nic requested bottled water and some extra towels they appeared immediately. Ramón gazed out our window at the desolate square with its dry fountain and the tall old church facing us like a stale wedding cake, smoking thoughtfully.

“You know you’re being watched, right?” he asked us.

“I know. By you and the desk clerk. We won’t leave.”

“No. By the hombre in the pickup.” He pointed out the window. The dark outline of a hat sat in a beat-to-shit pickup, parked in front of the movie house across the square. The last showing of
Fritz
had ended and the lights were off.

“Who is he?”

“Who knows? Police? Bandit? Maybe he followed you here from the north.” He threw his cigarette at the guy, but it just dropped to the street below, bounced once, and kept burning between two cobblestones. He grinned. “You better watch your step down here, gringo.” He winked conspiratorially at Nic. “Didn’t anyone warn you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They especially warned me not to trust taxi drivers.”

Ramón laughed and punched me in the arm. It hurt but I managed to smile instead of flinch. He bowed his head at Nic. “
Buenos noches, señora.
It was a pleasure drinking with you. I will see you in church in the morning.”

Nic locked the door behind him and went to the window. She stared out at the pickup, which sat in the shadows, the cowboy silhouette unmoved.

“He’s just smoking,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” I responded. I was sitting on the bed and my skull was spinning. It would rotate counterclockwise for a few turns, then lurch back.

“I think I know him from somewhere,” she went on, peering over the sill.

“You know he can see you, right?” I asked. “It’s dark out there and our light’s on. You’re lit up like a drive-in movie.”

“Oh shit.” She ducked in drunken panic and clawed the drapes. They came clattering down and she yelped as they hit her. “The light, the light,” she whispered, as if suddenly he could hear us too.

“Yeah, I’ll get it,” I said, rising carefully. “Just don’t wreck anything else.” I hit the switch, and like changing the channel, our room was now black-and-white, the furniture gray, the corners shadowed, the light through the window silver. I stared at the truck across the way. Its headlights came on and it rolled off lazily, muffler burping. I lifted the curtain rod back onto the brackets and drew the thin cotton closed. Some light still filtered through and there was a line of yellow under the door.

“He’s leaving,” I said. “I guess you scared him after all.”

“Fuck you,” she said from her spot on the floor, then, “Help me up. I’m drunk.”

“No kidding.” I grabbed her hand and hoisted her to her wobbly feet.

“OK, I admit it,” she declared. “I’m not really as tough as I seem.”

“You don’t really seem so tough,” I said, sitting back heavily on the saggy bed. “More kind of mean. Or cold-blooded, I guess. In a smart way of course.”

“Now that’s mean,” she said, waving a loose finger of accusation around the room. “And unfair. And now I really do have to pee. I’ve been holding it in since that fight.” She tottered over and flicked the bathroom light on, stood in the illuminated rectangle. “You know,” she said, unbuttoning her jeans, “I’m not really mean, or cold and tough like you think. Just honest.”

Then as if to prove all our points she used the toilet without shutting the door, kicking off her shoes and stepping out of her jeans. She sat and I heard her little piddle. I could see her feet, the red painted toes and the little blue panties binding her ankles. She flushed and stood, leaving the panties on the floor. She wriggled out of her t-shirt and unhooked her bra.

“I think we should fuck,” she said. “It’s the only way I’m going to get to sleep.”

“Um,” I said.

“Besides,” she explained, moving closer, entering the glow of the window, which touched her hair, shoulder, nipple, hip. “We’re both tense and scared with a high level of adrenaline in the bloodstream. Which can actually add a real boost to the sex.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that.”

Now she was in front of me, her smooth skin visible in the dark. “And then after we come, with all those endorphins released, we won’t be so angry or frightened anymore. And we can rest.”

“I’ve heard that too,” I said, moving only my eyes. “Amazing how the human body works.”

“Isn’t it?”

“The thing is,” I said, feeling my spine tighten as she sat on the edge of the bed across from me. “I do feel a little weird about us, you know.”

“Weird about what?”

“Us. You know, not really knowing each other.”

“What are you, a girl? I’m naked here, offering myself. What else do you need to know?”

“I mean being together like we were. Under false pretenses. For pay.”

“Oh I see. It bothers you that I’m a whore.”

“No. Shut up. It bothers me, or maybe depresses me is a better word, that I’ve been with two women in the last five years, you and my wife, and she dumped me and you were just doing it for money.”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, sliding under the covers, “I’m not being paid now. In fact, I’m paying. Which makes me the client and you the whore.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. “Good point.”

“Does that make you feel better?”

“Yes, it does, actually. It feels great.”

“Good.” She patted the mattress beside her. “Now take your clothes off, whore, and get in this bed.”

74

THE CHURCH BELLS WOKE US
. We dressed quickly and went downstairs to the square, where we could see a small crowd of black-clad mourners gathering outside the church. We gulped a quick coffee at the counter of a café and hurried across the plaza. We hadn’t brought formal clothes, but it was a rural place, a farm and ranching town, and while everyone was severely proper and all floors, hair, shoes, and children were spotlessly clean, dress codes were country and
there were a few men in stiff jeans, fancy boots, and shirts buttoned to the neck and collar, standing around, awkwardly respectful, holding their hats in their hands. You could see the deep furrows of the comb across their hair. We took up a post beside them, sentinels along the back wall.

Like many poor churches, it was magnificent and overwrought, festooned with glitter-and-marble icing, bedoodled with arches, niches, flying angels, singing saints, and hailing Marys. It stunned us with its space and height and cool silence, offering the people a tangible vision of heaven, a working model of the miraculous to comfort them as they died facedown in the dirt and sun.

The Maria we were burying had been poor too, and she’d vanished long ago, so the church wasn’t crowded. The few rows of weeping women and frowning men and squirming kids were lost in the deep stone canyon, and from where we stood the action on stage was obscure and distant, like hieroglyphics or a modern dance seen from the balcony. We left quickly when the pallbearers hoisted the coffin and the robed priest floated toward us.

The daylight blinded us. We stood to one side, hangovers pulsating, while the coffin rode out on the shoulders of six men, who eased it onto the back of a truck already thick with flowers. The priest looked odd out here in the light and noise, like a costumed actor who’d snuck backstage for a smoke or a wizard who’d been caught without his magic wand. He lit a small black cigar and put on mirrored shades. As the mourners filed out, more people joined the crowd. A small brass band began a wandering tune and the parade set off toward the graveyard. Nic and I tagged along with the stragglers, behind a wide grandma who rocked back and forth, holding hands with a little girl in a mourning dress complete with frilled petticoat, hair ribbons, and gleaming patent leather shoes.

“Fritz! Fritz!” the girl yelled, pointing at the theater, but her grandma dragged her after the coffin and we followed.

“Bastard,” I whispered to Nic, who shrugged and lit a smoke.

The inscription over the graveyard gate read
AQUI LA ETERNIDAD EMPIEZA Y ES POLVO VIL LA MUNDANAL GRANDEZA
, which Nic translated roughly into English as, “Here eternity begins and vile dust goes to the grand world,” and while the vile dust settled, on the stones and flowers and polished shoes, in our hair and throats and the lines on my hands, we followed the little troop into eternity, a city of tiny palaces that the good citizens had constructed to house their souls, like elaborate birdcages or the dollhouses of spoiled girls, far more splendid than their own mortal homes. After all, we are alive a short while, dead forever. As for this realm of dust, our grand and fallen world, only dead babies passed through untouched by sin and sorrow. That’s why in some places down here they were called angels, and the music played over their tiny coffins was joyous. They’d won.

To my surprise, due to some overflow of feeling, combined no doubt with my piercing hangover and raw, postcoital emotions, saltwater filled my eyes and began to dribble out. This being a funeral, I let myself burble, as if in an emotional spa, until I saw the frown on Nic.

“You OK?” she asked. “You sick or something?”

“I’m fine,” I said, abashed. “I’m just upset.”

“All right, calm down. I was just concerned.” She handed me a ratty napkin from her purse. “I’ve never seen a man just start to cry like that.”

“Jesus,” I said, suddenly laughing through my snot. “What a bitch.”

“Fuck you,” she snapped.

“Fuck you back.”

“Pussy.”

“Cunt.”

Then we noticed Ramón waiting patiently nearby. The funeral was done. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “My family appreciates the gesture of respect.”

We both mumbled condolences. I blew my nose loudly in the napkin, and Nic scowled at me, but I noticed her own eyes were
full now, perhaps only with anger, but my words had stung. Ramón went on.

“I have some news too. The authorities wrote back today. They say my cousin’s passport was renewed at the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles in 2000.”

“That makes sense,” I said. We explained how that year Zed killed himself, and his wife moved to Europe and their “Mexican friend” disappeared. Perhaps she was the missing girl.

“Yes,” Ramón said. “But then why nothing else, if she returned? No phone calls. No visit. And then there’s this. They sent a copy of the renewed passport.” He reached into his inner jacket pocket and drew out a folded sheet.

“There’s a problem with it?” Nic asked.

“A big one. This photo. It’s not my cousin. I have no idea who this woman is.” He handed the photocopy to Nic, who shrugged.

“I don’t know her either,” she said and handed it to me. I looked.

“I do,” I said. I held the paper hard, in both hands, as if protecting it from the wind that swept around us, raising dust. “She’s my wife.”