Richard Ford - The Ultimate Good Luck

He had thought for just a moment that the man was Frank Davito, a gunny from Minnesota who had had two wives at once. Davito used to say neither wife knew about the other one, though they lived two hundred miles apart, one in the desert near Hemet and one on the beach in National City, and each one loved him faithfully. Davito had said once, crouching in the rain and mist by the waffle iron at Khe Sahn waiting for chute drops off the C-130s, that he had figured out the happiest he ever was in his life was when he was locked up or in the war. He didn’t have to think about the women then, he said. He loved to see them, but it never lasted long, and he couldn’t stand worrying about them when he wasn’t with them. It made him too empty, and being in the war gave him something else to think about.

“Take your business somewhere else,” Quinn had said. The answer seemed obvious.

“Oh shit no,” Davito had said loudly and smiled. “I wouldn’t do that.” He smiled even broader so Quinn could see his teeth behind a stubble of beard and mud. “I couldn’t live without them.”

“Then get rid of one,” Quinn said. “Just pull her plug.”

“That’s too raw, Jack,” Davito said, shaking his head. The draft off the big planes stung their faces. “That’d be like living in Minnesota again. I use one against the other. You can’t fly solo.” Davito laughed. “You need your little cushion,” he said, and jumped out of the bunker and began running through the mud onto the open runway. Rounds were falling in, and Quinn squeezed deeper into the dirt, waiting for the next bird to bank out of the swirling clouds.

It made him think about the dead kid in his communion suit and half his ear whipped off. He seemed to have lost the cushion for it, the escape hatch to make that death not seem like his own death. And that was a cushion he needed if he was going to take this to the end.

The man who looked like Davito had strolled across the plaza and stopped in the sun at the edge of Hidalgo Street, hands in his pockets, looking longingly into the Portal, as if he wished he could get a table there where all the tables were full. The man looked like somebody you’d like, Quinn thought. His family was straggling behind looking inconvenienced. The girl in the pink shorts was still thinking about the soldiers and pulling her shorts down behind. The wife looked disappointed by how she felt and where she was. They seemed to be from Minnesota, and out of place on the zócalo in Oaxaca, and needed to be someplace where they could be happier. The man turned and looked at his family in a heartsick way, and when he did Quinn caught his eye for a long moment, as if there was something he wanted to say, though there wasn’t. The man’s family caught up with him at once and his wife began talking seriously, staring into his chest. His daughter had noticed Rae and was looking at her curiously, twitching her hip from side to side as if they were sharing something evil. The wife quit talking suddenly and extended her hands to prove they were empty and started walking away angrily, and the man looked back at Quinn and smiled and shook his head and stared down a moment, then stepped into Hidalgo Street to follow his wife. The girl waited a moment longer, entranced with Rae, until her father called and she turned away, her yellow hair catching a moment of pure sunlight.

The man made him feel like something was trying to get inside of him, something he didn’t want, like a regret, but that regret was only the advance party for.

“I was wondering why the streets all changed names in the middle of town,” Rae said cheerfully.

“Too many heroes,” he said, “not enough streets.”

“That must be a big problem in underdeveloped nations,” she said. She put her arms around his shoulders and held him tightly. He felt the same thick ether of regret rising in him. “You can’t let fellow Americans bother you,” she said in a friendly way. “They’re just in love, and they don’t know how to express it. Isn’t that what you believe?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

“You liked those shorts too, didn’t you?” Rae tilted her face back into the warm sunlight and closed her eyes. “Tight pussy,” she said dreamily. “It’s very stylish now in Moline or Carbondale, or wherever they’re from. Maybe Charlevoix.”

“I didn’t last very long up there,” he said.

She smiled into the sunlight. “You’re a great kidder,” she said. “You can’t be serious a minute. It makes it all seem worthwhile.”

“Just your bad luck,” he said. “You might’ve hooked up with a comedian like your brother and had it all your way.”

The day had begun to hot up. Second-class buses wallowed in through the streets, windows full of mute Indian faces. Diesel had begun to overpower the sweet cinnamon smell filtering out of the mercado. All the fountains were on.

He watched the Americans emerge onto the Avenue Independencia from the Portal, and into the sun toward the Baskin-Robbins where the grate had just been pulled open and a boy was mopping in the unlit inside. The Americans stopped below a chiropractor’s neon sign made to look like a spine, all the vertebrae curved and articulated, and bracketed to the chiropractor’s windowsill above the Avenue Independencia. They stood beside the Baskin-Robbins, and the girl was staring up while her father pointed out the sign, sweeping his big arm up and down to explain the shape. His wife was gazing out across the street and imagining, Quinn thought, that the day was heading downhill. There was a brown dog standing beside her looking where she was looking. Her husband turned and spoke to her. Quinn could see consolation on the man’s wide face. “I think knowing too much just makes you miserable,” Rae said, for no reason, and at that moment the Baskin-Robbins exploded.

And for a moment you could see nothing, and then you could see everything.

There was one great bulb of orange flame roaring outward and bursting apart in the air, and then a huge hot noise, and then the air suddenly was emptied of sound and filled with a baked greenish dust. It seemed, for a moment, as if a meteor had hit the building. A bright green taxi that had been in front of the Baskin-Robbins was blown away from the curb and into the street, and the air seemed for a moment to be the color of the taxi reduced to dust. The Baskin-Robbins, Quinn could glimpse through the panes of rising dust, looked like a garbage can emptied and kicked on its side. Whatever was inside was blown outside now or gone altogether. The chiropractor’s sign was missing. There were rag figures strewn on the sidewalk and in the street, but nothing was moving or flailing. Men began rushing off the adjoining street into the space of the explosion as though they were drawn in by the suck of air. Loud whistles were beginning. Tourists were running out of the zócalo in all directions. A woman screamed a long beseeching scream, and then a lot of people started yelling and the noise and swarming commotion took over.

Quinn was on his feet going toward the Americans or toward where they had been a moment before, but weren’t now. Outside the park shade the sun was suddenly much hotter and brighter, and he could smell rank-burned metal and cordite. It was familiar and became almost pleasant when the air overheated.

A siren began somewhere out of the Centro, and he stopped and looked at Rae, who was still at the bench, standing on it, her hands over her ears as though she could still hear an explosion. She had her glasses on and her face was unrevealing. He started back toward her through the mix-up of sprinting Mexicans chattering and searching all directions at once for a new peril. He was too used to being alone. His instincts were adjusted to that, but it was witless to leave her. Rae suddenly raised her hand and flung it forward, her face as calm as when she had turned it toward the sun. She thought there was no danger and he should do whatever he had begun to do. He stared at her a moment in the sunlight, then turned back to where the explosion had been.