Джо Горес - Cases

In a diner, sloppily eating things he’d never seen before, hadn’t even heard of — tacos and chiles rellenos and huevos rancheros and refritos and burritos , some of them so hot with chili peppers that he was chugging down beer after beer just to keep his ears from smoking as he listened to all the good old boys trying to out-Texas one another.

“Saw your wife the other day, she looked mean as ever.”

“Mean? Last week she hit a guy with her Cadillac and knocked him forty feet down the highway, yesterday she sued him for leaving the scene of an accident.”

Dunc ran every Texas sally and witticism through his mind, savoring it for his notebook.

“Was playin’ golf with Sam the other day, and we hadda wait for two women gassin’ by the eighth hole. So I started over to ask ’em to move on, then I seen who they was and come back and said to Sam, ‘You gotta go talk to ’em, Sam, one of ’em’s my wife and the other one’s my mistress.’ ‘Shit,’ says Sam, ‘I was just gonna say the same thing to you.’ ”

Falkoner said musingly, “You want to find Texas, kid, you just go west far enough to smell it, and south far enough to step in it, and you’ll be in Texas.”

All sound ceased in the eatery. Not a fork rattled against a plate, not a cup scraped on a saucer. The few Mexicans in the place were already edging toward the door.

“Say what, hoss?” demanded the burly, crag-faced cowboy on the stool next to Dunc. There was amazement in his voice.

“I said if you ever wanta give the world an enema, Texas is the place to do it,” said Falkoner, and leaned around Dunc to hit the man in the face with the bottle of ketchup.

Dunc saw a fist coming his way, slipped it, got knocked off his stool by someone else, kicked somebody in the stomach, got stomped on, got slammed into a table leg, scuttled for the door on his hands and knees. Scrambled to his feet, narrowly ducked a chair coming out the diner’s window in a beautiful crystal parabola of shattered glass, was running down the street, careening from side to side, laughing crazily.

Running beside him, Falkoner panted out, “What... do you tell a Texan... on his way... to the electric chair?”

“Wha... what?”

“Don’t... sit... down.”

Somewhere else, a nude girl on a table, humping her way on down to Satchmo’s “Blueberry Hill” from the jukebox, until she was squatting over a silver dollar balanced on edge, then picking it up without using her hands to wild applause from the all-male clientele. She repeated the action.

“Hey, watch this!”

A drunken giggling soldier was heating one of the dollars with his lighter before he balanced it for her. Someone smashed a chair over his head. It might even have been Dunc.

And still later, a broken-down shack on the edge of the desert with no electricity but a cockpit out in back starkly illuminated by the headlights of a dozen parked cars, mostly Cadillacs, dented and unwashed from hard desert miles, all with their motors running to keep the batteries alive.

Gas fumes made people cough. Male and female voices shrieked in Spanish and English as fighting cocks with shaved thighs and metal spurs fastened to their strong, skinny legs leaped and flapped and feinted and gouged. Half obscured by clouds of dust, gahaneros -shirted handlers blew into the beaks of live birds or cradled dead ones in their arms. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke, blood, sweat, the stink of fear and birdshit and testosterone.

Falkoner was leaning farther out across the wooden edge of the ring than Dunc would have thought possible, eyes bulging with excitement, sweat pouring from his face. Veins wriggled down the sides of his neck like snakes, pulsed down the center of his forehead like a forked tree. He was waving bills and shouting to get his bet covered for the next fight.

It was short and quick: within seconds, to mingled olés and curses from the crowd, one of the birds was dead in an explosion of blood and brown and white feathers.

For the second time that night, Dunc was almost sick to his stomach. Not from watching the blood and death. It was just that he wished it was the fucking handlers in there, being forced to leap into the air to rowel each other with steel spurs strapped to their shins while drunks screamed at them.

“Jesus, did you see it?” exclaimed Falkoner. “Did you see that fucking kill?” He turned away, pocketing his winnings. “I gotta fuck me a woman right now. Any woman. Right now.”

Dunc’s first coherent morning memory was of throwing up into the Rio Grande from the middle of the bridge. He shambled back into the States wondering: which one did I puke into, Mexico or Texas? He sort of hoped both.

Maybe his thoughts weren’t so coherent, after all.

His knuckles were skinned, his nostrils crusted with dried blood, one eye was puffed up — he’d be lucky if he didn’t get a shiner. His side was sore, his ribs ached, his gut felt as if it had been drop-kicked, and the small of his back was so stiff it might have been stepped on. Hey, it probably had been.

He had huge amounts of great stuff for his notebook — except he’d been too drunk to remember it. Lock himself in a room with a head of lettuce and a bottle of water for a week; he could be like Proust and have remembrances of things past.

Trouble was, his notebook was in the boot of Falkoner’s MG. And he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen Falkoner.

A parking lot, a few blocks from the border. But El Paso’s dawn streets all looked the same. And if Falkoner wasn’t there, how could he get his duffel bag out of the trunk? Buy a cheap screwdriver, jimmy the boot of the MG and...

Yes, definitely not too coherent yet.

And buy a screwdriver with what? His watch was gone and his pants pockets were all turned out. Thank God he’d left his ID in his duffel bag. Then he remembered Sarge’s money. By some miracle his breast pocket hadn’t been torn off his shirt and whoever had rolled him had missed such a stupid place to leave your stash. It was still there: seventeen bucks. Fat city.

But an hour later when he shambled into the lot where they had parked the MG, it was gone. With his duffel bag, his ID...

Later, somehow, some way, sometime, he was going to have to get to Palo Alto and find Falkoner and get his notebook and ID back. But right now all he wanted was out of El Paso, out of Texas. Hung over. He drank about a gallon of water at a public fountain, almost threw up again.

At a five-and-dime near the railroad marshaling yards on the western edge of El Paso he bought a ballpoint and a spiral notebook and a small tin of aspirin, washed down four of them with a cherry Coke. In a gas station men’s room Dunc washed his shirt and put it on wet, brushed his teeth with his finger and soap from the dispenser; he’d forgotten to buy toothbrush and toothpaste. He got to the highway and stuck out a thumb.

Fifteen minutes later he was on his way to Lus Cruces, New Mexico, on Highway 80, in a rattly pickup full of Mexican migrant workers who shared their tortillas with him and dropped him at the bypass where 180 headed west for Tucson. He had no Spanish, but thought they said they were going north to Albuquerque.

All together it took him seven rides and thirteen hours to cover 275-odd miles of scorching, mostly empty desert to Tucson, a land of multicolored rock and sand and buttes and coulees, sparse mesquite and paloverdes and saguaro.

His final ride was with two Negroes in a dirty bashed-up black 1939 Chevy. He sat in the back, the springs poking at him through knife-slashed seat cushions, the erupted stuffing looking like dried custard.