Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (18 page)

The mechanic looked at the fuel pump and shook his head,
no bomba de gasolina
—he didn’t have one, from what Danny could make out. They floundered around in two different languages and got confused. A
man standing nearby came over and asked if he could help. He interpreted: The fuel pump was for a very old model and only
junkyards might have one, what Danny had already guessed. Danny was given directions to a large salvage place and got back
in his taxi. By the time he’d located the junkyard, it had closed for the day.

The taxi dropped him off at the Hotel Belmar, one of Mazatlán’s original inns. Fine old building with painted tiles, dark
woods, and bullfight posters pasted on the walls. When night came he walked north along the sea and into the south end of
the main tourist district. American kids everywhere, behaving like assholes. He turned around and eventually found a small
restaurant near the hotel. The fish soup was good, and he lingered there for a long time over coffee.

On the way back to the hotel he picked up an English-language newspaper. The article was on page one:
KILLER SOUGHT IN NATIONWIDE MANHUNT.
It reported much of what he already knew and went on to say

One of the victims, George Cooper, was formerly a computer engineer with Frontier Science, Inc., in Dallas, Texas. The second
victim, Captain L. K. Reece, United States Navy, received a fatal wound in the neck. Both shootings are believed to be the
work of a professional assassin. According to an unidentified source in the United States, the killer is a former Marine Corps
sergeant who was well known in the Vietnam conflict for his deadly accuracy with all types of weapons and for his merciless
approach to killing. The source described him as “thorough and unrelenting when he takes an assignment. He is deadly, a man
without normal human feelings who will kill without mercy and who cares for nothing except his own survival and the task at
hand.” The source refused to identify the suspect by name and further declined to say why this particular man is the suspect.
Mexican authorities originally tried to suppress all news of the incident, but now have stated the suspect is heavily armed
and should be considered extremely dangerous. All branches of the Mexican police as well as the Mexican army and representatives
from U.S. law enforcement agencies are cooperating in the manhunt.

The children of Zapata toward sundown, skipping along the street and singing an old rhyme from the Mexican equivalent of
Mother Goose:
”Just as the sun was coming up/ The night before today / A blind man sat writing down/ What a deaf-mute had to say.”

The women of Zapata toward sundown: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee…” The rosary. And in ragged unison it
drifted through the open church door and reached almost to the plaza but failed to make it quite that far on the evening air.
If more had come to pray, the appeals for Mary to intercede with her son Jesús on their behalf might have reached farther,
but only seven women knelt there about halfway up the center aisle.

Clayton Price stood in the side entrance to the church and watched the women and listened to them and to Luz María, who had
no beads to count but had joined the women anyway after borrowing for her head his blue bandanna with white half-moon decorations
on it. The women had already glanced at her and the gringo and gone on praying while Luz María looked over her shoulder once,
then once again at the tall, thin man backlighted in the church door. Clayton Price could feel tjie sun’s heat on his shoulders
even then when it was low. Inside the church’s thick adobe walls the air was cooler and smelled heavily of oils and incense
and sins that had been forgiven long before the ending of this day in the Mexican cordillera, long before Clayton Price ever
held a gun in his hands.

The family of Clayton Price was not religious, but he had prayed once… prayed that he be allowed to die and doing that more
with his mind than with his voice, for he hadn’t been able to get any words on his tongue at the very moment when he’d been
naked and tied to a bamboo frame, and was being tortured in ways so hideous he’d eventually sent the memories of them to a
place where they lay quiet and could not be resurrected unless he consciously chose to bring them back. The scars on his body
were restless and tried to make him remember, but they could not, and he had a way of making his eyes go peculiar and unfocused
so the scars weren’t visible in any mirrors he might stand before.

He listened to the women’s voices and paid attention to little movements inside of him as he did, something he wanted to feel,
while at the same time disliking the sense of being fragile that seemed to come directly from those feelings. He listened
and watched the woman Luz María, thinking of her as she had bathed yesterday in the stream. He’d seen at that time the smooth
brown skin and vertebrae standing out against it when she’d bent forward and the breast she’d shown for only a quick moment
and smiling as she’d done it. And he remembered just how her body had looked to him and the old things buried deep but coming
forward when he’d seen her like that.

If he had not found that length of wire in the dirt of a Cambodian hut and used it as he had the night he’d escaped and on
the way out almost severing the neck of a man who had tortured him, he might never have had those feelings again. For the
little men in black had pricked his anal area with sharp bamboo and waved knives around him and pointed them at his testicles,
saying “tomorrow” in his language and making a noise with their voices sounding like the cut of a knife itself and laughing
when they’d said it.

There had been some of that in what had happened yesterday at the beach restaurant in Teacapán when the hom-bres were laughing
at him. The same twisted faces, the same mean smiles saying, “We will do things to you later.” He’d learned over his life
to back out of those situations when nothing was at stake and let them go by and walk away, sometimes hearing laughter saying
he was a coward or worse. In his business you did not draw attention either to yourself or your skills.

But the old jungle memories and the instinct to survive were only part of why he’d done what he’d done under the thatched
roof by the sea in Teacapán. The woman Luz María had been part of it, too, and he hadn’t liked being taunted that way in front
of her and wasn’t sure now whether he was only being protective as a father might have been or, on the other hand, being prideful
and shielding in the way of all men who rise to fight for a woman they wish to have for their own. He’d lied to Danny when
he’d said all eight hombres coming at once would have made a difference in the way things turned out. A
little
difference maybe, and he would have suffered more than a scrape on his face, but he could have killed them all with his hands
and knife and beer bottles and their own machetes turned back on them, or with the Beretta if things had gotten real disorderly.
The man with a broken nose and shattered cheekbone had come away lucky; Clayton Price could have taken the man’s eyes just
as easily as he broke the cheekbone and the nose on the face above the body where a machete swung.

And standing there while the rosary sounded, he remembered his private oath taken over thirty years ago that he would never
care again, never expose himself to all the hurt caring brought. But the woman Luz María was kneeling before a god Clayton
Price didn’t understand and had knelt over her parents’ graves yesterday and prayed then, and was praying again here. And
in a way he could not grasp, her prayers seem valid to him and should be answered, if this god she prayed to had any favors
left to give after all He’d been asked for.

When the rosary was finished and the other women gone, Luz sat with him in a front pew and tried to explain Catholicism, how
it had a comforting, nurturing side to it, in spite of the pope’s insistence on women having as many babies as possible in
a country where there were already too many babies riding on the hips of sixteen-year-old girls. The shooter didn’t know much
about Catholics, but he’d met a Jesuit priest once in Venezuela and drunk some wine with him. Luz said that didn’t really
count, since the Jesuits went their own way most of the time, almost like a separate religion all their own. Her mother had
said as much after a Jesuit had come to their village seeking money for his foreign mission one time and gone off pretty much
empty-handed but understanding also the people of Ceylaya didn’t have much themselves.

Clayton Price told her what the Jesuit had said: “”fou don’t preach religion to people with hungry bellies. First you fill
the bellies, then you preach religion.”

Luz replied that sounded right to her, but that a lot of Mexican village priests had never quite grasped the idea. Mostly
they prattled on about trusting in the Lord and not practicing birth control, though their attitudes had been discreetly changing
in the last twenty years. The pope had come to Mexico once, in an effort to renew their fervor, and the priests had listened
to him, but the pope didn’t have to deal with women in the confessional who already had six children and couldn’t adequately
provide for them. When the pope left, the priests returned to searching for a fine line between the church’s ideals and the
practicality needed if their flocks were going to remain manageable.

Luz and the shooter left the church an hour before sunset. They walked through the winding paths of the village, past houses
set into hillsides. The sound of Maríachis came out of windows and doorways, radios filling the night with the sound of an
older Mexico, one that was passing and would never come again. With the music behind them, they followed an old road down
to the abandoned silver mines that had once made Zapata a place of treasure for the Spaniards and other Europeans later on.
The silver was taken out by mule, each mule carrying two 50-kilo ingots on its way to the sea. Most of the old mining machinery
was gone, the Japanese having bought it just before the Second World War. They had come here and hauled the scrap to Mazatlán,
shipped it to Japan, and melted it down for the metal.

Some of the mine entrances were still open, and Clayton Price wanted to go inside, but Luz thought it would be dangerous.
He did it anyway while she waited outside. They walked back to the plaza by a different route from the one they’d taken, passing
by a house where a young man was cutting an old mans hair in the twilight. The old man sat very still, the younger one talking
softly and scissors moving.

There was only one telephone in the village, in a store near the church. The shooter gave the proprietor money to let him
use the phone and made a collect call somewhere. Luz couldn’t hear what he was saying, except for something that sounded like
“Tortoise” and then the phrase “LC, silver mine,” which he repeated several times. But she could tell he was angry, and he
finished by nearly shouting, “Goddammit, you
owe
me this!” He slammed the phone down,

then softened when he looked at her, and they went back to the cantina.

Earlier this day, after Danny Pastor had left for Mazatlán, Luz María and the shooter had taken a late lunch, sitting in the
shade of the cantina’s porch. She’d drunk a margarita and he’d drunk a beer.

She’d pointed toward the steep hillsides where village men were working. “They say in these hills a man can be killed by falling
out of his cornfield.”

And Clayton Price had laughed at that, the machete cut on his cheek hurting only a little when he’d crinkled his face. There
were many ways to be killed; falling out of a cornfield was probably the better of most, though not a way men would choose
to die, he’d thought. He’d watched her mouth as she’d spoken and wondered for a moment what it would be like to touch her
and wanted to do it right then, except she’d turned and looked back at him with black female eyes appearing as if they might
not mind if he did touch her, causing him to pull back. So he’d reached for his beer, looking up at the hillsides again, and
pretended he was still smiling at what she had said about farmers tumbling out of their fields.

From the cantina’s porch, he’d pointed to a house snuggled into the hills about a mile out and had said he wouldn’t mind living
there, living a quiet peasant’s life. His eyes had gone lambent, and he’d said he sometimes wished he were five years old
again and had the long carpet of innocence before him. That he felt like a lone, wild bird circling the ponds of autumn, looking
for a place to land. That he regretted there’d been no Sunday afternoons in the park with children. Or softball games in the
evenings, or a wedding in which he’d given the hand of his only daughter. None of that. No quiet rocking on a southern porch
at sundown, gin and tonic in hand and savoring a day’s work well done and in which no harm was intended or accomplished.

He’d told her of a recurring dream in the nights of his life. That he flew from a high trapeze, somersaulting through the
air, but the bar where the catcher was supposed to be waiting was always empty. The dream never failed to end the same: he
would slam onto the sawdust floor and lie there broken and dying, the audience applauding as it filed from the circus tent.