Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (10 page)

Within two minutes, all eight were looking at Danny, Luz, and the shooter, talking in the way drunken men all over the world
talk. Get two or more of them together— Mexican or otherwise—get them drinking a little, and the testosterone seems to obtain
a multiplier effect from alcohol and numbers. Here in a thatched roof bar on the coast of Mexico, an extra dimension of the
thing called machismo was sprinkled over the hormones and mob bravado.

It was the kind of situation where you think, God, I’m glad I don’t have a woman with me, especially a pretty one. But Danny
did, and she was Mexican and she was with two gringos, and that just complicated things even more. Danny was watching the
shooter’s face and could tell he didn’t like what was going on, either. But he was staying quiet, drinking his beer, keeping
one foot against his knapsack under the table.

“Hey, gringo, got a match?” Oily Shirt was leaning backward toward the shooter, speaking rough English. The shooter looked
at him for a long moment, then reached in his left breast pocket and took out the silver lighter.

“Oh, no, amigo.” The
bormcho
laughed and switched over to Spanish, black hair falling partly over his face. “I no longer need a match, I have found it—my
butt and your face.”

Evidently the shooter didn’t understand, since he continued to hold the lighter toward the Mexican. The entire table of them
was roaring with smart-ass laughter now. They’d found someone to ridicule, someone so old and afraid, he’d still light their
cigarettes even after they’d insulted him.

One of them shouted,
“Polio,”
clucking and squawking in a bad imitation of a barnyard hen, at the same time holding up his right hand with only the first
and little fingers extended—”Screw you” in Mexican sign language—and burbled through his laughter,
“No huevos”
—literally, “no eggs,” “no balls.” It was a way of showing the pretty señorita what cowards gringos really were. Danny started
to make get-ting-up-and-leaving moves.

Oily Shirt decided to let the shooter light a cigarette, since the thin, gray-haired man in jeans and khaki shirt and ball
cap was clearly anxious to please and thereby avoid any trouble. The man shook out a cigarette and leaned toward the shooter.

What happened next happened fast, and Danny wasn’t quite sure how it got done, but the shooter torched the Mexican’s oil-
and grease- and gasoline-soaked shirt with his lighter. The man jumped around, slapping at the flames and trying to unbutton
the shirt all at the same time, couldn’t get it off in his panic, and began running for the ocean twenty yards away. Danny
knew the three of them were in real trouble and already had Luz on her feet and heading toward the Bronco.

One of the other hombres grabbed a machete and came toward the shooter, swinging it. The shooter went into a half crouch,
executed some kind of martial arts move— graceful-like, arms and long thin legs all moving at the same time—and the Mexican
went to his knees, nose smashed and bent sideways, piece of broken cheekbone poking through his skin, machete lying in the
sand beside him. Two others jumped up. The shooter reached under his shirt in the back and pulled out a knife with a bone
handle and four-inch blade. Everything stopped for a moment, while the bar owner screamed at all of them.

After a few seconds, the shooter picked up his knapsack and walked toward the Bronco, looking over his shoulder once. The
hombres stayed where they were, stunned by what had happened. The man with the burned shirt and burned chest came out of the
water, stumbling across the sand toward the Bronco, tatters of shirt waving and arms flailing, calling the shooter everything
bad you can say in colloquial Mexican Spanish when you’re mad and ready to kill. The shooter let him come on, then kicked
him in the crotch when he got close enough.

Danny started Vito. The shooter slid in and looked down at the Mexican puking on the beach.

“Let’s get out of this shithole,” he said, sticking the knife back under his shirt.

He lit a cigarette and settled back in his seat, watching the hombres as the Bronco went past them. He wasn’t smiling, yet
he didn’t look particularly mad, either. Danny was shaking and checked his side mirror, where he could see two of the hombres
gathered around their fallen amigo on the beach. The man was still on his hands and knees, retching. Under the thatched roof,
the others were tending to the man whose nose had been smashed and whose face would never look the same.

A few miles down the road, Danny calmed a little and glanced over at the shooter, noticing a bad scrape on the left side of
his face, just in front of his ear. He’d poured some water on a blue bandanna and was dabbing at the scrape.

“You okay?” Danny asked, feeling bad about not helping him out in the fight, though not too bad, since he wouldn’t have been
much help.

The shooter didn’t look at Danny, but continued working on his face with water and cloth. “Yeah, edge of the machete just
clipped me when it came out of his hand. It was a stupid thing to do. I’m getting too old for that nonsense, letting pride
overcome good judgment. I know better and should’ve just backed out of it.”

He was missing part of the cut as he worked on it. Luz reached out and took the bandanna from him, steadied his neck with
her right hand, and gently wiped away blood with her other hand. He stiffened a little, either because of the touch of her
hand on his neck or because of the wound. Danny couldn’t tell which. After that, the man who called himself Peter Schumann
sat very still while she cleaned up his face.

”fou sure seemed to handle it all right.”

The shooter dug around in his knapsack, brought out a tube of ointment, and smeared it on the cut. “It was stupid.

There were eight of them. If they’d all come at once, we’d still be back there, and I’d have a lot more to tend to than a
minor scrape. There’s been a general decline in the gene pool all over, and it’s best just to ignore it. You can’t fight the
world.”

“I feel bad about not helping you out.”

“No, you did the right thing, getting Luz out of there. ’You’d have just been in my way. I’m used to taking care of myself.”

“Where’d you learn to fight like that? Was it karate or what?” What Danny was really wondering was how far things would have
had to go before he’d have used the gun in the knapsack.

He wasn’t smiling. “Combination of things I picked up a long time ago.” He sighed, leaned back, and lit another cigarette,
watching the countryside going by.

A minute or two passed, then he said, “Wonder what it feels like to be an insane ocelot… inside the head, you know. Must be
colored a burning red orange… what you’d see in there, like fire so hot you can’t stand it, like a white-hot poker on the
tongue… like fire ants crawling around in your rectum.”

He was talking to himself more than to Danny. Danny let it go by and glanced over his shoulder at Luz. She sat quietly, looking
at the back of the shooter’s head. After a while she came to her knees and put her chin on Danny’s shoulder, put a hand inside
his shirt. The wound on the shooter’s face looked dry-blood red and sore. Luz took her hand out of Danny’s shirt and laid
it on the shooter’s arm. The shooter didn’t move and kept staring straight ahead.

When they passed Ceylaya again, Luz turned and sat looking through the rear window of Vito. The village lay a quarter mile
off the road.

She had been born there, María de la Luz Santos, born low. How far down? Being the last of six children in a Mexican peasant
family, and a girl to boot, was bad enough. Because the other five were all boys, she’d started out twenty-some cuts beneath
rock bottom. The social rankings worked to favor gender first, age after that. The males dominated, and deference to them
was compulsory, particularly and especially to the father. Tack youth on to that, and María de la Luz Santos had been subservient
to everyone.

Such was the order of things. Hard, but double hard when you had the kind of dreams Luz had, even as a young girl. Hazy dreams
from the old magazines she’d read, from the embellished stories migrants had told when they’d returned from
el Norte.
Even without that information Luz would have had her own dreams; she was that way.

She’d awakened before dawn in late summer of 1983, eight years before she would meet Danny. Roosters crowing, first light
coming, mist over the fields, and a feathery breeze through the village called Ceylaya. She’d helped her mother cook breakfast
for her father and brothers. Before seven o’clock, Jesús Santos and his three eldest sons had pedaled rickety bicycles to
the chili plantation where they worked eleven hours for low wages. The two younger boys spent the day working in the family’s
portion of the communal fields.

On that morning ten years ago, her stomach had hurt and she’d bled a little the day before. She was twelve, and something
was happening inside her body she didn’t understand, since her mother had never told her about menstrual cycles or anything
else connected with womanhood. But the bleeding scared Luz, so when pressed, and looking at the young black eyes asking questions,
her mother tried to explain as best she could. She’d said this was God’s way of preparing Luz to have a family.

Luz had also asked if she might have a blanket of her own. It hadn’t seemed right anymore to be sharing one with the youngest
boy, Pedro, and sleeping on the straw floor mat next to him, since he was now fifteen and once or twice his morning erection
had accidentally touched her while he slept. She’d been too embarrassed to speak of these things, but clearly it was time
for a blanket of her own. Her mother had said she would talk to Luz’s father about it.

The roosters were joined by other village sounds, and Luz, twelve years old and dreaming, had thought of the day to come.
She would sweep the dirt floors of the two-room house, sew, and pat-pat tortillas in a rhythm her mother called the heartbeat
of Mexico. It was too dark to see what hung on the adobe walls, but she’d known what hung there from having looked at those
walls for all the years of her life: old newspapers and calendars, a few religious posters, and one photograph of Jesús and
Esmeralda Santos on their wedding day. The photograph, yellowing and curled a little, would have been nicer if a drunken hombre
hadn’t been holding a glass and looking over her parents’ shoulders when the picture was taken.

In the front room her other four brothers had been waking up. The boys shared two beds, and between the beds was a wooden
table holding a stack of schoolbooks and Catholic religious pamphlets. Below the table was a wooden chest where the family
records were kept, baptismal and birth certificates, and a few more photos taken on special occasions, such as Jesús-the-second’s
confirmation day. Esmeralda Santos was allowed a corner of the chest for her single pair of shoes and the one good dress she
owned.

In the afternoon Luz had helped the younger boys in the fields, bending low, picking vegetables her mother sold to other villagers.
Out there in the sun, Luz’s feed-sack dress had blown up around her legs and her straw hat flapped in the wind and dust, but
the string around her chin held the hat close to her thick black hair.

Coming home from the fields in those times, Luz had kept her eyes straight ahead, not looking at the men in the outdoor cantina
who already were watching her as she passed. It was understood she would marry one of the younger ones and keep his house
and bear his children. “As many children as God decides,” was the church’s rule, though the village women seemed unconvinced
when they said it. In the way things were, and are, Luz would be expected to endure her husband’s beatings when he’d turn
up drunk and to treat him perpetually as if he were his own small god of the household. “The man isn’t perfect, but he’s yours.”
That’s something else the village women had said.

Two years later she’d awakened in the same way in the same room, on a straw mat next to her parents’ bed. She had the mat
to herself then, since a space for Pedro opened up when Jesús-the-second found a job near Teacapán, working as a gardener
in a small gringo colony. Luz was fourteen, and the younger men were beginning to stare at the front door of Jesús Santos’s
house. Sometimes they talked to her at village fiestas. She kept her eyes downward most of the time while they talked, but
not all of the time. Luz was different, which was a third thing the village women had said.

Luz had been fortunate in one way, since a spasm of educational reform provided the local school with teachers who could take
her all the way through sixth grade. No farther, but at least that far. By Mexican village standards that was good. Her brothers
had never gone beyond fourth grade, except for Jesús, who completed five years before he’d gone to work for the gringos near
Teacapán to bring money back home.

Jesús-the-elder had spoken to her mother, saying grade three was enough for a girl, saying also too much education made women
difficult to handle and a husband for Luz would be that much harder to find. Luz’s mother had argued with him and said Luz
was special, that she had dreams and should go as far as the teachers could take her. For such insolence Esmeralda Santos
was beaten, but she was stubborn about it, and Luz was allowed to continue in school. She’d learned to read and write and
studied basic Mexican history, a history colored by emotion and not entirely accurate, but no worse than colored-up history
anywhere. She’d also learned to hunch her shoulders and bend a little forward when passing the village men, hiding in that
fashion her breasts, which already were large and seemed to grow more so every day.

The other village girls were envious when a gringo photographer had visited Ceylaya and had chosen her for a series of portraits.
He’d followed her into the fields and photographed her in her straw hat and feed-sack dress. And later a package had arrived
with a picture of her, neatly matted and framed in silver. The photograph showed her standing, with the sea wind whipping
her light dress about her legs and bending the brim of her hat. She was barefoot and smiling in a shy way back over her shoulder
at the camera. The quiet, long-haired man in khaki shirt and orange suspenders had also smiled when he’d finished, lowering
his camera and saying what he had just done would make a nice photograph of her and that he would send a copy. She kept the
photograph as one of her prized possessions, a reminder of her village days.