Джо Горес - Cases

Dunc hadn’t, but he remembered how exotic Mexico had seemed in that Robert Mitchum movie His Kind of Woman. They picked up Highway 80 at Van Horn, rode it 120 miles to El Paso, which was just across the river from Juárez. They zipped past the vast sprawl of Fort Bliss, the red car turning the heads of the crisp-uniformed MPs manning the gates. Falkoner, driving left-handed, unconsciously massaged his forearm with his right hand.

“Had enough of that crap to last me a lifetime.” He jerked up his left sleeve. The forearm was scarred and disfigured, little of it remaining beneath the shiny scar-tissued skin except the bones. “Little gift from the fucking krauts. Army surgeons wanted to cut my arm off, said I’d never be able to use my hand again.” He worked his fingers and grinned angrily. “A hell of a lot of weight lifting got the remaining muscles to take the place of those that are missing. So I’ve got full control. Fuck ’em.”

He jerked down the sleeve and drove left-handed while snapping the cuff button shut with his other hand.

“Those bastards hurt me plenty,” he added obscurely.

El Paso was a booming oil town with a population squirting ahead almost as fast as the oil was squirting from the ground. The Franklin Mountains sliced the growing city right down the middle, made the east and west sides almost two separate towns.

Late afternoon shadows were reaching out for them when Falkoner parked the distinctive red sports car in a lot a few blocks from the border. He casually tossed Dunc’s duffel bag in the trunk — he called it the boot — with his own luggage.

“A lot of car-theft rings operate out of border towns like Juárez, a car like this draws ’em like flies.”

They walked along South El Paso toward the bridge spanning the thick brown swirling waters of the Rio Grande. On the other side was Mexico. Tall wooden derricks were scattered along the river, some still pumping to fill the air with the rotten-egg smell of crude, others with their rusting machinery quiet.

“Don’t expect anything of the real Mexico in Juárez,” said Falkoner. “Border towns don’t belong to any country.”

Most of the foot traffic on the International Bridge was going against them, from Juárez to El Paso, most of it Americans, many of them soldiers in khaki uniforms with their cunt caps set at jaunty angles on close-cropped heads.

“This morning it would have been Mexican women going into El Paso to shop; in another hour it’ll be Mexican maids going back into Juárez from their jobs in the big gringo houses.”

Dunc tried to see in the Rio Grande the clear sparkling river of a hundred Saturday morning serials, where the white hats splashed their horses across the Rio Bravo in pursuit of the black hats. This was more the muddy Mississippi at flood stage.

“I hear they have bullfights in Juárez.”

“Not today. They get their big crowds on the weekends.”

Leaving his own country for the first time — Canada didn’t really count — had Dunc up, excited, asking stupid questions.

“If the bullring’s closed, what’ll we do over there?”

“Anything we’re big enough to do.” Falkoner gave him an evil white grin with a lot of teeth in it; just beyond midspan he paused to spit down into the moving brown waters. “And in Mexico we can do even more than we’re big enough to do.”

The two beer-bellied, dark-skinned, uniformed guards in caps with exaggerated brims didn’t even look at them as they walked through the Mexican checkpoint.

“I thought we’d need passports or something.”

“White faces bring in them old Yankee dollars.”

On this side of the river, South El Paso had become Avenida Juárez. Dunc could see the sprawling oval of the bullring, plastered with fight posters in Spanish. Dunc was in Mexico — Mexico! He felt an excitement that was like being scared.

Falkoner was different here, swinging his shoulders when he walked, not caring who else was on the street. He’d brought a lot back from the war besides the mutilated left arm. Like the airmen in Fairbanks, linking arms down the main drag of town, knocking man and woman alike off the wooden sidewalks into the muddy street. Until they met bands of loggers doing the same.

Falkoner turned west off Juárez on Tiaxcala, after a time turned left on Degollado, muttering something like “Calle Mujeres” almost to himself. He suddenly stopped in front of a storefront joint on a narrow dirt street. “Yeah, it’s still here. The Red Arrow.” To Dunc, the cantina looked no different from any of the others. But Falkoner’s eyes were feverish, his face tight and shiny. “I started my war ten years ago right here at Fort Bliss. They didn’t have the neon arrow in those days.”

There was indeed a red neon arrow on the wall pointing down at the delights hidden behind the double swinging doors, then folding up into a pointed squiggle, then snapping out straight again. It was enough like Alaska that Dunc stopped short.

“Let’s make sure there’s a back way out first.”

“Of course there is,” said Falkoner. “I know this place.”

But they went to look anyway. The narrow dirt alley’s smell of refuse overrode the pervasive hot oil and spices and frying tortillas of Juárez. Half a shattered small-watt lightbulb hung over the Red Arrow’s warped back door. Dunc noted with approval a thirty-inch two-by-four leaning against the wall.

Inside, the Red Arrow was like the saloon in High Noon, where everybody turned down Caine’s request for help with fighting the outlaws coming to town for revenge. Do not forsake me, oh my darling, on this our wedding day...

Falkoner’s wife had forsaken him a month after the wedding day. Not Dunc’s business. But somehow he wasn’t surprised.

The bar was down the left wall, a wooden stairway led up to the second floor. Serapes and high-crowned Mexican sombreros hung above the backbar as decorations. Half a dozen ten-gallon cowboy hats hung off hooks between booths crowded with foursomes.

Falkoner slid onto a stool and held up two fingers. “ Dos cervezas — cold.”

The bartender set out two dripping brown bottles that made instant puddles on the scarred bartop. He reached for the church key hanging from his belt by a leather shoelace, but Falkoner stopped him by flipping off the caps with his Swiss Army knife.

“Never use a glass in Mexico — and open ’em yourself.”

They tapped bottles, drank icy beer. The Red Arrow was crowded with cowboys in high-heeled boots and off-shift roughnecks with permanently crude-blackened fingernails. The rest of the men were of assorted ages but all wore parrot-bright sport shirts hanging outside khaki pants, black shoes, and hair cut so short above their ears that their heads looked white.

Some of the girls were dusky-skinned, others obviously Anglo, some almost ugly, some pretty, two almost beautiful. All of them, whatever their configuration or race, were blond and wore low-cut blouses above tight skirts.

Dunc fired down his beer, he’d been really thirsty, nodded at the bartender to set up two more, unopened, on the bar, then jerked his head at the crew-cut men scattered through the crowd.

“Soldiers from Fort Bliss?”

“Yeah. If they came over in uniform the MPs’d get ’em.”

Falkoner bit the caps off these beers.

On the jukebox, chapel bells were ringing and Little Jimmy Brown was getting married. Falkoner was getting divorced after two months. A couple went upstairs. The chunky Mexican girl’s skirt was so short Dunc could see the curve of her buttocks. He felt a stirring in his groin and looked quickly away.

A buddy who’d joined the navy after high school had written him at Notre Dame, “Jesus, you should of seen the bitch I nailed in a cathouse in Yokohama! Jesus, could she fuck!”