Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

Torn-up newspapers, courtesy of Giselle Marc. The same word rose unbidden to both of their lips.

Gadjo.

It was getting hot. Trinidad Morales licked his crusted lips and bunched up his round brown face against the exquisite thunder inside his skull, gathered his courage, and opened his eyes. And SCREAMED.

Facing him from a foot away was a monstrous dragon, tongue flicking, unwinking eyes staring into his own with cold intensity and contempt. He tried to thrust himself back from the terrible monster, but he was gripped by a giant’s hand that...

Oh. The seat of the Brougham. Which was parked on a flinty narrow track in the desert, starting to cook in the morning sun. When he had screamed, the three-foot iguana had fled to the far corner of the dash on which he had been sunning himself. He crouched there now, hissing in terror and defiance, long whippy tail lashing his distress.

Morales groaned. He opened his door and staggered out into the sunlight. To one side were nearly vertical rock faces. He began sending a seemingly endless yellow stream down over the rusted narrow-gauge railroad tracks beneath his feet...

Railroad tracks?

Hand-laid on rough-hewn ties, they ran toward the rock face and disappeared into the black mouth of a tunnel with a broken-down miner’s shack beside it. Glassless window, gaping door, sprawling shamelessly in the desert sun like an overused harlot.

He shook, encased, zipped. Shards and snippets were coming back. The Giggling Marlin. Margaritas. Drunken Gypsy. Upside-down Gypsy. Cadillac. Mexican ready to eat an iguana. Cow looking in through the windshield, cow ?

He remembered getting the keys, going outside, buying the iguana, taking it with him in the car. Driving north through the warm black night toward La Paz, the twisting rising falling blacktop, the lights picking out cattle all over the open-range desert, the road itself... Almost off the road. Cow looking in the windshield, front bumper two inches from its legs. Mooo.

Morales scrunched his way across the mine tailings to the shack. Legless chair, three-legged table, what once could have been a bench to put a bedroll on. And a Mexican comic book. A romance, shamelessly saccharine. He left it for the next pilgrim, crunched back to the Brougham.

After the cow, mountains. Terror. Drunk. He’d seen this rocky track off to his left, taken it until he was out of sight of the road, had switched off and passed out. End of story.

The iguana was on the driver’s seat. Staring at him.

Good to eat; in Mexico, as often as not they were the chicken in your pollo . Tasted like chicken. They said that about everything from rattlesnake to, he bet, monkey meat. Tasted like chicken.

Morales had bought the iguana because the Mexican was going to eat it and Morales didn’t want him to. Between him and the lizard was a gut connection, one of the few Morales could remember making with any living thing. He opened the car door.

“Okay, kid,” he said in English, “beat it.” The iguana stared at him unwinkingly. He made shooing gestures with his hand. “Vamoose, muchacho.”

The iguana waited a moment longer, then flowed down over the edge of the seat past him, scuttled off a few yards across the rocky terrain of his natural habitat. Stopped, swung head and trunk around to regard Morales from those ageless eyes.

“Vaya con Dios,” said Morales.

With a sudden whip of his tail, the iguana was up on his toes and sprinting gracefully off across the rocks with a dry scrabbling sound, out of sight and gone forever.

Morales got into the Brougham and started the engine and backed out toward the blacktop. He would follow it north to La Paz, and, eventually, nearly a thousand miles north of that, to the U.S. border entry point at San Diego.

Meanwhile, Trinidad Morales had just done the first good deed of his entire adult life.

Giselle Marc stormed into Larry Ballard’s second-floor cubicle with a heavy green plastic garbage bag over her shoulder. She thudded it to the floor by the corner of his desk, eyes flashing, fingers unconsciously hooked and ready for clawing.

“What did you do to him?” she demanded.

“To whom?” asked Ballard casually and grammatically, taking the precaution of getting to his feet for a few quick defensive moves if she started clawing. As in eyes out.

“You know who — Rudolph! You tricked him out of the pink Cadillac and—”

“It was Yana’s in the first place.”

“It actually belongs to a restorer in Palm Springs, so don’t give me that Yana stuff. If you hadn’t taken it, Rudolph never would have gone off without telling me and—”

“No?” Ballard leaned forward intently. “How do you think I knew I could snatch that pink Cadillac away from him?”

“H... how?” Giselle felt her face getting tight and hot.

“Marla, the check-in clerk, he was banging before—”

“That’s a lie!”

Ballard caught her wrists before her nails could bite his face. “Yeah. Cheap shot. Sorry.” She stopped raging and he released her. “Anyway, she told me he’d settled his bill the night before and was leaving by midmorning yesterday. I bribed a car-parker for a uniform and brought the car up for him.” Smugness entered Ballard’s voice. “Only I drove off in it myself. I rubbed his nose in it!”

Giselle upended her plastic garbage bag over his desk. Out cascaded great heaps of small-denomination greenbacks, some banded, some loose, spilling out and eddying down to the floor. Clods of dirt fell out also as she glared defiantly at him.

“The Teddy White score — I took it away from your precious Yana and rubbed her nose in it!”

Ballard’s brows were terrible to behold. He looked like a berserker from Norse mythology. They were face-to-face, inches apart, quivering with anger and hurt, their voices crescendos.

“You drove her away from me!”

“She didn’t need me to leave you!” she yelled. “She was on her way out of town with her brother — their truck was packed to the roof with all their cheap gimcracky Gyppo crap.”

Ballard grabbed up Marino’s satchel from behind the desk. Clicked open the top. “Yeah? Well, look at this!”

The satchel was stacked to the mouth with orderly banded packets of greenbacks. Giselle stared with stricken face.

“Rudolph spent three weeks —”

Dan Kearny’s voice crashed down on them from the doorway like a huge breaker on hapless swimmers.

“QUIT ACTING LIKE GODDAM TEENAGERS THE PAIR OF YOU!”

“He—”

“She—”

“Cry on your own time.” But advancing into the room, he stopped to stare openmouthed at the money on Ballard’s desk. He faltered, “What in heaven’s name... is going on in here?”

They talked over one another like siblings vying for a parent’s attention, Kearny listening with darkened face.

“What pink Cadillac?” he asked finally in ominous calm.

“The pink Cadillac the dying King wants to be buried in.”

Giselle added, “Rudolph wants to be King—”

“And Yana wants to be Queen,” finished Ballard.

“Dying King, huh?” said Kearny, a sudden gleam in his eye too brief for either of them to catch. “Pink Cadillac. Yana. Rudolph.” He looked from one to the other of them. “What the hell else don’t I know?”

“Nothing,” they chorused too quickly, not meeting his eyes, then told him they didn’t even know where the King was dying.

“Steubenville, Iowa.” This riveted their attention: where the King was dying, there would be Rudolph and Yana. He suddenly thundered at them, “Put that goddamned money in the safe until I figure out what to do with it! Get hold of O’B in Florida and Bart in Chicago and tell them to meet us in Steubenville. Counting the one in Baja last night, we’ve only repo’d eleven, leaving us twenty to go — twenty-one if we add that pink Cadillac. Most of them ought to be at Steubenville.”