One Step Over the Border (6 page)

“The only good thing I can say about this Juanita… she ain’t ugly. She’s got pretty eyes.” Hap wasn’t positive whether the
gnawing in his stomach was due to nerves… or appetite. He pushed back his black beaver-felt cowboy hat to survey the crowded
cantina. Most of the occupants had dark hair and dark brown eyes, all of them smelled like a hard day’s work, and almost all
were men. It was the kind of place where scars outnumbered tattoos, but just barely. The
A la Luz de la Luna Camara
flashed the first sign across the border offering “
algo de comer
”… something to eat.

Laramie rubbed his unshaven chin and peered through the smoky cantina, then lowered his voice. “I agree with you there, but
she’s rather… eh… large-boned, don’t you think?” He tried, but failed, to slide his glass across the sticky bar.

Juanita’s multiringed fingers dwarfed her half-filled glass. Weak elastic strained to keep the scoop-neck scarlet peasant
blouse on her shoulders. She leaned close to Hap and pursed her peppermint lips.
“¿Qué dice tu amigo?”

Laramie nudged Hap with his elbow, then spoke in a low monotone. “I’m glad she doesn’t understand English.”

Perched between Juanita and Laramie, Hap leaned back on the battered wooden bar stool and studied the woman. “What he said
was, ‘The Juanita I’m lookin’ for don’t need to buy two tickets just to fit on the bus to Del Rio.’”

Like a bobcat let out of a cage, Juanita’s tight fist slammed into Hap’s chin, grin still plastered in place. His hat tumbled
off. The back of his head forged against Laramie’s forehead like a twelve-pound sledgehammer on a cold anvil.

Both men landed on the worn linoleum floor backside down. Laramie rolled to his hands and knees. Hap got lifted off the grungy
barroom floor by two men who made robust Juanita seem petite. Hap struggled to pull his arms free, while Juanita’s second
blow punctuated his stomach. By sheer strength of will, or blind luck, he turned sideways. Juanita’s kick landed on his hip
instead of its intended location.

Laramie jumped the shorter of the two men holding Hap. The man spun around so fast that he got tossed like ante into the middle
of a Texas Hold ’Em table. Angry shouts and rib-bruising jabs greeted him.

Now held by only one man, Hap ground the heel of his cowboy boot into a sandal-covered foot and jerked loose. With a scratchy
CD of Freddy Fender singing “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” blaring in the background, he dove toward the poker table. A bulky
hombre decided to demolish an oak chair into Laramie’s stunned expression. The chair missed, but several calloused knuckles
looped him to the floor.

Hap ducked a punch from the right. The flying chair splintered across the man behind him. He took two steps for what he thought
was the door, but got clotheslined in the neck by big Juanita’s fleshy forearm. He gasped, hands on his knees, until someone’s
roundhouse caught him in the chin and laid him flat on his back again.

The saloon engulfed in a free-for-all, big Juanita took advantage of the inequality of the sexes to clobber one man after
another.
“Me los llevo a lo macho,”
she bellowed.

Hap spied Laramie crouched under the poker table. Broken glass sliced through the knees of his split jeans as he inched over
to his partner. Angry screams, Spanish curses, and the crack of breaking bones roared in the battleground above them.

“If you’re through visiting with this Juanita, I’m ready to go,” Laramie hollered.

Hap deflected a flying claw hammer with a broken chair. “I was sorta hopin’ to take a leisurely stroll through Matamoros by
moonlight.”

Both cowboys winced at the sound of breaking glass on the table above their heads.

“It’s the same moon as last night,” Laramie told him.

Hap tossed the chair remnants out into the room. “I reckon the stroll can wait, but I never did get my order of buffalo wings.”

A battered bar stool crashed into the table leg. Then a wave of beer from a broken pitcher cascaded off the table and splashed
over their heads. Laramie rubbed his eyes on Hap’s shirttail. “We got to make it to the door without losing life or limb.”

A lit cigar dropped to the floor in front of Hap, a yellowed tooth embedded in it. “I ain’t payin’ for buffalo wings that
I didn’t get.”

“Watch out, Hap. Your Juanita is headed this way.”

“I told you, she ain’t my Juanita. And it ain’t a fair fight with her carryin’ a knife.”

“Shoot, it’s no fair fight when she doesn’t have a knife.”

Hap slammed his pointed boot into a red-faced man sprawled on the floor who was grabbing his ankles. “Hey, if you want us
to go now, that’s fine with me. I know how you’re shy and don’t like crowds and meetin’ new folks.”

Laramie scurried out on his hands and knees and took a shin to the ear. He slid across the floor.

“The front door’s over here.” Hap edged through the shuffling feet of the cantina’s combatants.

“Hap, no, not that way!” Laramie tottered to his feet and lurched toward his partner.

Ducking a punch, Hap shoved the assailant into a white-haired man in a tattered three-piece suit. The old man broke a maple
pool cue over the man’s head. Both men staggered to the floor.

“Any door is a good door!” Hap kicked it open and dove inside, dragging Laramie by the collar. The door slammed and locked,
and both men wheezed in the darkness.

Mayhem muffled the music on the other side of the door as Hap felt a release from the iron grip of tension around his stomach.
While hundreds of Juanitas danced in his mind, he felt the freedom of escape from this one.

“Where are we?” Laramie gagged. “Smells like a…”

Hap felt along the grimy wall until he found a light switch and flipped it on. A bare forty-watt bulb hung from a wire and
flickered a glow that almost reached the floor. Water from an overflowing toilet flooded across his boots as a rat scampered
for higher ground. “Must be the ladies room.”

“Ladies room?” Laramie stared in a mirror as murky as water downstream from the herd. He dabbed at blood on his forehead.
“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. The men’s room ain’t this clean.”

“I told you the front door was in the other direction.”

“You want to go back out there?”

“No, but I don’t want to die of suffocation either. Let’s see if that window will slide up.” Laramie shoved against the side
of the two-by-two-foot window. “I bet it hasn’t been unfastened in a while.”

“Well, it’s goin’ to open now.” Hap stepped up on the rim of the busted john and added his shove to Laramie’s push. The entire
unit… casing, frame, sill, and window… tumbled to the hard-packed ground outside the cantina.

Hap scaled the back of the toilet tank for a boost and dove out into the fresh air of the Rio Grande night. His thin, lanky
partner followed. Both men lurched to their feet.

“Can we make it to the truck without being ambushed?” Laramie asked.

“I reckon we can meander across the parkin’ lot as if we don’t know nothin’ about no fight inside.”

The moonlight glowed just bright enough to reveal their scrapes and bruises.

“Sure, we can tell whoever stops us that we look this way because we got our spurs caught on the bumper of a Peterbilt that
dragged us all the way down here from Corpus Christi.”

Hap brushed off his black hat. “Wait, we got to go back. I didn’t pay my dadgum tab.”

“No time to worry about money, partner. Lives are at stake here.”

“There ain’t nobody ever goin’ to say I welched on a debt. I pay ever’ bill. You know that about me.”

“Mail them a money order.”

“Nope. I settle up with cash.”

Laramie waved his long arm at the hole in the bathroom wall they just vacated. “Toss it into the ladies room.”

“How do I know the owner will get it?”

“How do you know he won’t? The door’s locked. Besides, he has to feed his rats sooner or later.”

Hap dashed back to the hole in the wall and sailed a wadded-up ten-dollar bill and two ones through the opening. “I ain’t
leavin’ them a tip,” he muttered.

When morning broke, Laramie poked out his head from a sleeping bag. Hap crouched over a tiny mesquite fire, wearing only jeans
and hat.

“You painted up for war?”

“Mercurochrome. Stops the bleedin’. Not easy to find these days, but nothin’ works better.”

Laramie pulled his long legs out and reached for his socks and boots. “I didn’t remember you getting cut that much.”

“Thin skin is a family tradition.”

“I always thought that was a figure of speech.”

“In my family, it’s a painful reality.” Hap hung the long-sleeved black denim shirt on his back as if it were sunburned. He
took great care with each snap.

A live oak tree and the horse trailer blocked their view of the highway. It gave the camp a private feel. What grass had grown
in the powdery yellowish dirt had long since turned brown. Even though the sun perched on the eastern horizon, a wispy, faded
gray three-quarter moon stenciled the pale blue western sky.

Hap ambled over to the horses tied to the trailer. He shoved a flake of hay in each of their feed buckets, then stroked the
black gelding. “Good mornin’, Luke. You ready to get a taste of Texas? Bet you’d like to stretch your legs and chase a cow
this mornin’. So would I, partner. You didn’t plan on livin’ in tight quarters this long.”

Hap pondered how things turn out different from what a man plans. He had deliberated for years coming down to Texas and solving
this thing with Juanita. But now he faced the undeniable fact that he didn’t have a real handle on how to find her. Laramie
had often said it was all an excuse to avoid any relationship. Though those were cutting words, Hap decided maybe he was right.

He asked for Luke’s right front hoof, then held it and studied the frog and shoe, trying to concentrate on equine care as
his mind locked on his quest to find the childhood Juanita. He couldn’t explain why it ate at his soul or how it pushed him
through every day’s activity. At times he felt trapped in a Broadway play beginning its nineteenth season. The same old lines,
the same old scenes.

He put down the hoof and tapped Luke’s right rear leg.

Yet, he couldn’t release the dream. His heart still jumped when he recalled her voice. And when he got lost in the memory
of that day, he gained a certain vitality, a feeling of being fully alive… that he didn’t experience any other time. Others
told him it was puppy love. They said it would soon pass. After almost two decades, they had all been proven wrong.

He inspected Luke’s left rear hoof. The black horse winced when he ran his calloused fingers over the frog area.

He glanced back at Laramie and watched his partner pull on a green Carhartt Henley shirt. Hap marveled that he would trek
down to south Texas with him on what amounted to a lark, and knew Laramie’s loyalty piled up a debt almost impossible to repay.

“You want me to start the eggs?” Laramie called out.

“Yeah, go ahead. Lukey’s got a bruised foot. How did he do that in the trailer?”

“You goin’ to slap a rubber boot on him?”

Hap studied the horse’s hoof. “Yeah, for a few days anyway.” He glanced over at Laramie’s blaze-faced bay. “You want me to
check Tully’s feet?”

“Don’t let him kick you.”

Hap rubbed the horse’s neck. “Well, Mr. Tully. I don’t worry about you. Horses kick. And bite. And buck. Nothin’ can change
that.” He hefted Tully’s right front hoof and muttered. “But people can change. Anyway, I surely hope so.”

Both men dressed and huddled next to the fire, blue tin cups of bitter coffee in their hands.

Somewhere under melted yellow cheese and chunky red salsa, a half-dozen scrambled eggs lined their blue tin plates. Using
a rolled-up corn tortilla for a scoop, Hap crammed a spicy bite into his mouth. “I believe my tongue is hot enough to boil
water.”

“They do make good salsa down here.” Laramie swished his coffee around in his mouth before he swallowed it. “But this is a
long drive from Wyoming just to find it.”

When Hap sucked in a breath of air, it felt cool all the way to his tonsils. “I know what you’re thinkin’ about our brief
stay in Mexico last night. But she’s got to be somewhere. I have to give this a try.”

Laramie used his tortilla like a washrag and wiped his plate clean. “It was nineteen years ago.”

“Some things a man don’t forget.”

“A man? You were twelve years old when you visited with that cute Mexican girl for two hours while your daddy fixed their
car in Wyoming.”

“You know it’s been eatin’ at me ever since. You knew that from the first day we met. I explained it in the steak house east
of Greybull.”

“I know I’m the only one who would put up with your idiot obsession.”

“You’re right about that, partner. But it’s a drive… a goal… a life purpose… not an obsession. It’s more like a dream. Without
dreams, a man dries up inside.”

“Hap, you’re thirty-one years old and you refuse to date anyone not named Juanita. It’s a full-blown obsession.”

The cool westward wind drifted over them, pregnant with heat to be birthed later in the morning. A distant rooster sounded
startled to crow so late. Bacon grease congealed in a black skillet parked in the dirt between them.