Richard Ford - The Ultimate Good Luck

“It doesn’t help me,” Quinn said.

“Why don’t you just shut up, Harry,” Rae said wearily from the back seat. “Being an asshole isn’t helping anything either.”

He concentrated on the big Corona Cerveza sign he could see at night from the bungalow, blue-lit against the dark matter, a flat globe shining without motion, the continents shuffled to one side. At night he felt appealed to when he saw it, as if there were endless places to be, every one better than here, though he never believed it in the daylight, and didn’t believe it now.

THE CENTRO FELT to him like Vietnam again, a crystallized stillness above the rooftops and a swarming, full-bore eeriness in the street.

Café tables in the Portal were jammed with tour-bus passengers drinking Cuba libres, and campesinos down out of the second-class camións milling in the sun, crowding the tabloid stalls. Bernhardt had left them in the middle of Las Casas Colón behind the Juárez Market, and Quinn had pulled Rae through the corridors of swaying meats out into the Avenue Ruyano between the banquettes of country flowers and Zapotec nostrums that cluttered the business end of the mercado. She hadn’t mentioned Sonny. He understood she was storing that to deal with in private, and that that was the right way. She was giving him time to think of what to say.

He walked her up the busy perimeter of the zócalo opposite the Portal, toward the cathedral, and he realized suddenly he had no destination except to keep moving until three o’clock when he had to see Bernhardt. The zócalo felt weird. There were too many soldiers, as if the entire place knew something he didn’t. He felt like they were on the run now. It was a new feeling, and he wasn’t sure what moment it had come about, but it seemed for real.

“Where’re we going?” Rae said and stopped in the street.

He looked around the Centro for a place to go. Nothing seemed very charming.

“The Victoria,” he said. “You can have a sandwhich and watch the view.”

Rae pulled a piece of her red hair nervously. The park photographers were mounting tourist children on white horses and taking their pictures while the buses waited. He remembered the lavaliere for the first time under the seat of the car. He wanted to give it to her, but the car was at the bungalow, and there wasn’t time for it.

“Where’re the whores?” Rae said. “That’s all I know about Mexico. There’re a lot of whores.”

“Out in the soledad,” he said. “You wouldn’t like it.”

“That’s all I know to do, then,” she said earnestly. “I don’t want a sandwich.” She paused a moment. “Who’s Deats?”

“He’s Sonny’s pay master. He thinks Sonny stole what he was asked to pick up.”

She stared into the zócalo. “Did he?”

“They think so. That’s what seems to matter,” Quinn said. He guessed this was as straightforward as it would get.

“Are they just trying to scare him?”

“We can’t wait around to find that out. Carlos has to see about Deats,” he said.

“I want to worry about that, but I’m losing it just a little now,” she said. “I wish I was stoned. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

They sat at the edge of the zócalo where the tourists wandered out of the park. It was market day and the band kiosk had soldiers in it, three boys with submachine guns, watching the promenades, while vendors in the basement stalls sold ices to the campesinos. A lot of blanket sellers were in the cafés and the sky had become waxy and hot. It made him feel as if bad things were catching up with him.

“Can you tell which ones are the French women?” Rae said and began fitting her lens back in her glasses frame. He watched two slender women walk arm in arm across Hidalgo Street and disappear into the arcade of the Portal. “They all have pretty ankles and little asses,” Rae said speculatively, gazing at where the women had been. “They were on my plane yesterday. The blond one said that women whose chief asset was their looks only get praised in terms of age. They talked about that the whole time, in French, ‘à les expressions de l’age.’ ”

“Were they talking about you?” Quinn said.

“I imagine so,” she said. “They’re just cunts.” She gazed up toward the government palacio. A contingent of police loitered beside the gate, M-2s slung over their shoulders. The army made the police nervous, and they stayed in the loggia, whispering. “Do you know why the Mexicans stare at us?” she said.

“They hate the fucking sight of us,” Quinn said. She was doing it right, holding herself in, making conversation to make things all right. She never felt sorry for herself. It was admirable.

“That’s not right,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s because we have blue eyes.” She snapped the lens into the frame neatly and began polishing it on her sleeve.

“You don’t have blue eyes,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s my discovery. I knew about whores, and I discovered that. I’m trying to be good.” She looked at him prettily.

“It’s because they can’t believe anything they hate so much can look like you,” he said to please her.

She sighed and leaned her face back into a rectangle of sunlight that had split through the jacarandas. “That’s wrong, Harry,” she said. “It’s sweet. But you always make things seem worse than they are.”

“Can you spot the narco agents?” he said, watching the stone plaza. There were more hometowners than usual now, big pale Midwesterners standing hoping to see something that would make them feel justified about leaving. They noticed all the wrong clues, and they made you feel abandoned. It was why he didn’t like downtown at noon.

“No,” Rae said, without raising her head to look, keeping her face toward the sun. “I don’t look at things that way. I just see things as paintings.”

A man was getting his shoes shined in the row of open chairs facing the taxi queue. He was a large handsome Mexican in a white camisa, with wavy hair and a bull head. He was lording over the boy below his knees, pointing to where the boy had missed a place. “Watches,” Quinn said. “They coerce French tourists for their digitals. They can all say ‘Give me your watch or I’ll can you for drugs’ in French.”

“Did you ever do that?” Rae said. “Did you ever coerce anybody when you were a warden?” It didn’t matter to her. It was just conversation.

He watched the agent step down off the chair and walk away without paying, the boy waiting in the sun, shielding his eyes. “Sometimes I’d hide south of Charlevoix and stop waitresses going south and make a deer check.”

“Did that work?” she asked.

“About half the time,” he said.

“Did you ever get a watch?”

“Never did,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” she said. “Is that why you quit?” She raised her head an inch and looked at him. “Because you didn’t get a watch?”

“I quit to come down here.”

“Of course. Sweet man,” she said and put her head back in the sun. “You’re a sweet man, Harry. I thought this would be easy for you.”

“It should’ve been,” he said. “Nobody forced me to come. I’m a natural volunteer.”

Across the plaza he saw a face he thought he knew, a face with a flat boxer’s nose and wide, deep-setting eyes. The man was big-bellied with hairy forearms and wearing rubber-soled huaraches and a white T-shirt he’d sweated through. He was with a woman who was large and had on blue bermudas and a sleeveless blouse that showed fat arms. She looked shy and pale-skinned as though she might be getting sick. A teenage girl trailed behind them. She had on pink terrycloth short-shorts that bound in her crotch. The girl looked like she wanted to be doing something else. The man was pointing out fretwork along the mirador of the palacio de gobierno that he wanted them to look at specially. He was exuberant, but neither his wife nor his daughter was looking, and the man kept pointing, then looking back at them. The daughter was eyeing the soldiers in the band kiosk who were looking at her and smiling and whispering. The wife seemed not to want to think about anything, and her husband kept putting his hand on her arm.