Richard Ford - The Ultimate Good Luck

Bernhardt had let him out in the Centro opposite the statue of Admiral Antonio Leon, facing the west, and drove off to check on Deats, whoever he was. Oaxaca was built to the medium municipal standard of small Mexican cities, two parks and a church, catty-cornered, with an open-air portal squaring everything. Americans drinking at the outdoor tables said you could see everyone in Oaxaca in a matter of an hour, and everyone you ever knew in a year. But that wasn’t enough of an inducement. A group of women had gotten out of a yellow and green tour bus across the zócalo park and were setting up their aluminum easels on the eminence of the cathedral. They were crisp in the way they stood easel legs between the cobbles, as if they had pictured doing it every night for a month. They looked like Americans, and they looked anxious. They intended to paint the cathedral in the straight noon light, which was a mistake, he thought, but it was serious to them.

His stomach began to cramp vigorously, and he walked across the alameda and down Hidalgo to a pharmacy. It was wrong to be in town past noon. Bad light, rain, and then it got lonely, not like an American city, and he wanted to get up the hill to the bungalow and lie down. He bought a plaquette of Lomotils and took three, standing in the farmacia doorway. Bad customers. You took Lomotils furiously in Vietnam, and they shut you down eventually and made you melancholy and forgetful. After a while they were worse than being sick. But he thought with luck he’d be out before his insides collapsed. “Kill the body, the head dies.” It was a joke then.

He walked back up Hidalgo toward where the streets changed names, to the cabstand. The streets changed names at the Centro and made the town hard to learn. He wanted to wash the prisión smell and the Italian girl off his skin before Rae showed up. And he needed to sleep, to let Sonny settle out. It would be raining in an hour, and he wanted out of the middle of things.

The Centro was crowded, and the streets were noisy and full of motorbike traffic. The air libres on the Portal were all open. Waiters stood in the arcades, snapping white napkins sullenly toward the few empty tables. Quinn walked out of the Portal and into the warm sunlight. There was a thick rain smell out of the park and the center of town felt too active with tourists and American hippies hanging with the Mexicans. There was a sense of anticipation he didn’t like. The fountains were turned on. The Zapotec women were seated on the plaza plaiting their children’s hair, and there were a lot of blue police at the perimeter of the park in their swaybacked hats and dirty ascots, waiting for something wrong to happen that they could stomp on. The second-class buses that had been out on the highway were arriving, clogging the arterial streets, with greasy faces still at the windows and soldiers asleep in the step wells. The wire mesh Christmas bells were strung all the way round the zócalo, and there were lights in the jacarandas, and a big silver tree stood riotously on top of the band kiosk. Mexicans thought Americans wanted it to be Christmas every day and they were happy to provide the illusion.

The American women who had set up their easels beside the cathedral were already in the Portal having coffees, sitting in the oily shade admiring their intentions. At the door to the cathedral two girls in white communion dresses waited to step through the high door. While he watched, a Mexican boy in a red T-shirt appeared at the wall of the cathedral. The boy stared at the easels for a moment and at the girls standing on the stone steps, then darted down the row of easels, kicking the third legs so that the easels were all flattened in ten seconds, the paints spilled over the stones, and the boy vanished back in the crowds down Bustamante. One of the women in the Portal screamed, but most of them just sat still when they saw the easels go. It was efficient work, a nice symmetry. The women should’ve been able to tell, he thought, that precisely that event would take place. But they couldn’t. It was what made them tourists. They looked and didn’t see.

He read the American paper in the cab and tried to sit still so the Lomotil could work. Altitude had effects. One disease could imitate another. He pressed below his right floating rib. A swelling would mean hepatitis, but there was no swelling.

All the stories in the American news were published in the wrong syntax, U.S. TEAM WINS ISRAELI RIFLE SILVER. Below it was a photo of some American marksmen holding rifles and smiling in yarmulkes and nylon jackets. Another said ASSOCIATION OF TWINS INTERNATIONAL MEETS, and above it was a photo of some fat twins. There was a story about a grandmother in South Dakota stabbing a lion to death with a button hook inside her travel camper. The story didn’t say how the lion had come inside the camper or why there was a lion around at all. Mexicans would understand it. Americans lived in an ocean-to-ocean freak show, and there was a good reason to be here where things were simple instead of up there where things were bent wrong. He checked for baseball scores in the back but there was only fútbol from the Federal District. He put his head back and closed his eyes and tried to let the pills work. Only assholes got sick. He couldn’t be sick now.

The bungalow didn’t smell good. The moza was supposed to come in the morning to scrub the floor and launder the sheets, but it was clear she hadn’t been there. The Italian girl’s blue paisley underpants were lying in the doorway to the bedroom. The bed, in the shadows, was still torn up, the sheets half on the floor. He picked up the underwear and walked through the entry to the living room to open the mirador. Someone was in the living room.

“I can’t see how you rate this nice place,” the Negro said. He was standing at the picture window, and when he spoke he half turned and glanced out the window as if the best part of the bungalow was outside. Quinn got completely still. He wanted to be between the man and the bedroom, which led to the bathroom where the pistol was. He estimated eleven steps, no locks. “They’ve got me in some kind of bad shit bag.” The Negro smiled and let his eyes come to Quinn. The television was on, but the sound was off. The room felt too small.

“I think you got the wrong address,” Quinn said. He felt prepared to move. He knew who the man was. He didn’t know if the man would know that.

“I want you to tell your boy to start doing me right,” the Negro said, and sat down in the swivel chair. He looked at his fingernails as he talked.

Quinn thought four seconds to get under the tiles and have some competence with the pistol. A cramp fluttered at the bottom of his stomach. Not an urgent sign, but an urgent sign wasn’t far back. A second man stepped out of the bedroom pointing a revolver at him. A Mexican, an older man in a pink rayon shirt and rheumy eyes who was taller than the Negro and was wearing a straw porkpie hat. Quinn looked back around at the Negro. “ ’Fraid I don’t get it,” Quinn said. “Maybe you could just tell me who in the fuck you fellows are?”

The Negro took a joint from his shirt pocket, lit it, and watched Quinn through the smoke while he downed the toke.

“I know you,” the Negro said in a constricted voice and smiled. “You been to Big Nam, got all kinds of good sense. You’re down here getting your man out of the J.” Deats held his hit as long as he could, his smile widening all the time. His face was khaki colored and smooth. He was thin and in his twenties and had on an expensive beige sweater and creased pants. He didn’t look like anybody Sonny would get to know real well.

“Look.” Quinn looked back at the Mexican holding the pistol. The Mexican hadn’t made any noise. He was standing impassively in the bedroom door pointing the revolver. Quinn looked back at Deats hopefully. “I picked up a little dys,” he said, “and I’m not in fighting shape right now.”