Richard Ford: The Ultimate Good Luck

In the bungalow the girl wanted to do everything, as though going to the fights had been her bad idea for a good time and not his, and she wanted to put it right. She took off her clothes in the living room without talking, took a lude, then got on her knees beside the davenport and licked him down his legs and up his chest and his arms and blew him in an expert way that made him come fast. She drank some mescal out of a bottle in her bolsa and took a crossroads, then walked him into the bedroom as though the house was hers and turned on the lights and sat on the side of the bed and looked like she wanted to apologize for something. She was a smaller girl with her clothes off, with turned-up breasts and thin legs. Her hair seemed thicker in the light, and when he got in bed with her she climbed on him and fucked him until she worked herself down into her pill and the mescal, down below whatever she’d seen in the boxing ring that was making her want to apologize. It hadn’t been what she bargained for, but he thought she was the kind of girl who made the most of things, and he admired her for it, though he had lost any philosophy that made it possible to feel sorry for her. When she was finished, she got off him and went to the bathroom, and came back with a wet cloth and wiped it over his legs, and in a little while she lay back on the pillow in the light and went to sleep.

At two o’clock he got out of bed, turned off the light and did pushups till his arms ached, then walked out onto the walled patio where he could see the city against the black Sierra and breathe the bougainvillea. In the war, this was scrounge time, when things got dicey. The incomings wasted you out of sleep, slammed your face in the dirt, clawing the deck for a flak vest and helmet. He didn’t want to be asleep at two o’clock anymore. He preferred to be alert to whatever there was to hear. The bungalow sat on a long, eucalyptus-shaded hill that humped back toward the big mountains north of town. It was the suburbs. Americans rented there because the bungalows were cheap and neat and had grassy lawns and no deposits were taken. But he didn’t know the American girls next door, and now that Rae was coming with the money, and the hard part was done and Sonny was coming out, he wouldn’t have the chance. He had begun, in a month of waiting and passing through offices and anterooms, and seven months living alone, to feel like he was losing a freedom of some kind, getting cautious without any gain back in precision. Bernhardt said it was the American experience abroad, the long decline in expectation until you could see the immediate world like a native, but without the native’s freedom. It should be a great unburdening, Bernhardt said, but to Americans it was always a hardship. Bernhardt thought Americans thrived on protecting privileges nobody else would ever want. Bernhardt liked explanations. It was a lawyer’s vice.

Oaxaca sparkled like a matrix of platinum sequins laid over velvet. The dark played out into the valley south toward Chiapas, so that where the land stopped and the sky began was a boundary lost to sight. He counted landmarks every night. The pink rotator on the airport tower, the blue Corona Cerveza on Bustamante, the hollow lights that shone all night on the cathedral opposite the zócalo, and the red Pepsi script shimmering far out in the Mixtec barrios beyond the river. There was never a sense of intimacy. The town seemed to function practically in the visible distance, though the empty air in between became enticing and silent and still. The American Highway curled down the mountains, split, circled the city two ways, then reunited, and the only detectable movement there was the lights of an overland truck gearing down before flatting out into the valley. Americans were off the road hours ago. The trucks and the Dinas would blink their lights, then run you off the cliffsides.

Quinn thought when you hung out in the present, which he did, you slipped free of the past, though not the future, and all the anxieties came in at higher calibers. It was why he liked fucking phony Italian girls from the Portal, and why he’d let Rae leave when she got ready. Too much future, too much anxiousness. In the present, he knew precisely how it would all feel every time: the contact, then the being alone, then somebody else coming in to fill up the space. That was manageable, and you felt lucky and not anxious, and when it wasn’t done right, like this time, it didn’t matter. Except for Rae. Rae had left a space he couldn’t quite manage anymore. And he’d come down for Sonny just to get Rae, since Rae seemed essential to the present, and since he was tired of being alone with himself. Efficiency only took you so far.

Her letter had said, “Dear Harry, No phone? Are you still up there protecting the animals in silence? If so, could you bear to protect one more? (That was my joke, though jokes aren’t your long suit.) I apologize for saying Sonny’s in trouble in Mexico. Needs money. Needs help. It’s me who needs protecting. Could you do this one? Could you, would you? I think there’s still a chance. Call me on Long Island. Love Rae. (remember me?)”

He had closed up the trailer in two days.

Inside the bungalow the Italian girl was having a bad time. The mescal willies. She turned and threw her arms up in a mescal dream. It made you feel like you were falling through water where there wasn’t any bottom to reach. She called out, “Please don’t get in bed with me, will you please not, please.” He wondered if she was dreaming about him or about the boy with his eye thumbed out or about somebody even worse.

He watched another truck wind down the American Highway, let his eyes widen in the darkness. He’d be happy once Rae came back and they could get out. That was all he cared about now. The fights hadn’t made him feel lucky, but they hadn’t bummed anything either, and that was acceptable. It could be worse. He heard dogs barking down in the Reforma. A bitch was in heat, and all the other dogs were enjoying it.

He walked back inside. The Italian girl was sitting in bed in the dark, smoking a cigarette.

“I don’t know why I came up here with you,” she said. She was angry, and she was getting ready to split. He sat on the wooden chair and wondered how she’d get back down the hill to town. “You meet a lot of people traveling,” she said coldly. “People you wouldn’t think of passing time with somewhere else.” She blew more smoke into the air and watched him in the dark. She seemed sorry about a lot of things all at once. “I sucked you off, right?” she said. “And I don’t even know your name.”

“Harry Quinn,” he said. He tried to think of a funny name, but couldn’t come up with one funny enough. It didn’t make any difference. She was just a bimbo, and she knew it, and she was pissed about it. He couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t had first-rate treatment.

“You could be a policeman, you know,” she said. “I’m smuggling fucking ludes and crossroads and you could bust me, and where would I be?”

“Looking at you, you’d probably still be right here,” Quinn said. He wanted to give her her due, but he didn’t want to be up all night sympathizing. He knew he should’ve gotten her out before she went to sleep.

“That’s the problem for foreigners in a strange country,” she said.

“What’s that?” he said.

“A frame of reference,” she said. “You lack a frame of reference that allows you to take the right mental picture. I’d never know if you were a fucking federate until it was too late. You could be a federate for all I know, and I’d be in the prisión with all the other assholes.” She mashed the cigarette out on the wall behind her. He thought he could end it better than this. He wanted to go back to sleep, but thought he might’ve waited too long. “I trusted you,” she said, and cleared her throat of smoke. “You know trust is at the heart of love and art and all kinds of shit. And you could have just had me off. What does that shitty tattoo say on your arm?”