Richard Ford - The Ultimate Good Luck

“No hay matrimoniales,” he said proudly.

“What’s that mean?” Rae said.

“No double beds.” Quinn signed and gave the card back, waiting for the key.

“He thinks I’m a whore,” she said and smiled at the clerk. “It must be these heels.”

“It’s a boring job,” Quinn said, and put the key in his pocket.

The room was hot and full of flies and smelled like old laundry. Rae opened the window and stood for a moment looking without talking, as though she saw something in the distance over the low prospect of town that reassured her. Quinn pulled the transom, put his gun in the bureau drawer, and sat on the one wooden chair and watched the flies being soothed past Rae into the open night. In a while she took off her dress and lay on the bed beside the window in her white bra and underpants and the necklace he’d given her, and shut her eyes. Quinn turned on the bathroom light and checked the shower for scorpions, but there weren’t any. He thought about the money up in the bungalow, but there was nothing he could do. It would keep there unless someone tore down the house. He washed his hands and walked back in the room.

Rae had begun to breathe steadily, her hair wide and deep red against the white covers.

He sat in the chair and watched her. He hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, and hadn’t had a pill in twelve. He was stronger than he thought he’d be and straight-headed. He watched Rae breathe until he heard steps in the hall approaching the room. Someone coughed, a man’s voice, then keys jingled. He heard a lock fall, then the steps grew farther away and a door closed. He thought about Bernhardt, with every bullet in him as though he had danced to catch them all. He wondered if Cinco de Mayo was blocked off with trucks flashing lights, and soldiers sealing off the sidewalks. He imagined separate faces, Zago and Deats, but they seemed to lose ground irretrievably and be replaced by a vista over pale grey water, at the perimeter of which tiny dots didn’t move, like boats too far out to picture. Bernhardt’s absence made him feel marooned close to the clean, satisfied edge of exhausted possibility, beyond affection or sorrow, the stalemate edge of all losses, the point where time froze on whatever was present, and nothing could be longed for or feared or protected against, where luck was not the thing you played. It was the best luck there was. He might’ve liked Bernhardt, he thought, if he’d known him somewhere else. He had liked Bernhardt not always telling the truth, and not lying, and not leaving when he could’ve left. But that was it. He’d see Sonny one more time because he still had the responsibility to console. But he didn’t love Sonny. And sometime in the afternoon he’d get on the plane with Rae, then that would be all that mattered anymore, an intimacy that didn’t need an outside frame.

Rae stirred in the bed. Her legs parted and she moved on her side. Time seemed to expand around him and expectancy subsided. He sat beside her on the bed and listened to her breathe and watched her as though she was the only thing he could see. He put his cheek on her side and felt the firm hits of her life. Her flesh seized, and he knew she was cold, and he lay beside her in his clothes and put his arms around her and held her to try to make her warm.

AT TEN HE WALKED across the Centro to the agency on Hidalgo Street. He had Rae’s ticket validated and bought his own. The ticket was for nine in the morning. It gave him time to see Sonny and do what there was, and then get out. The connection went into New Orleans.

He walked back across the zócalo to where Rae was waiting at the taxi queue. He didn’t want her at the bungalow now, but he didn’t want her in the hotel either.

She stood in the fresh sunlight, looking up at the miradors circling the Centro as if they were a serious problem she didn’t understand. She had on new blue sunglasses. “I know what’s wrong here, Harry,” she said.

“All of it’s wrong,” he said. He motioned for a cab. He wanted off the street. There were more tourists in town, and female students walking to the technological college in pairs. Things were resolving back to everyday enterprise. The Baskin-Robbins was still cordoned. The sky was wan and bluish, and the Christmas lights had been turned off, but the nearness to normal gave everything a delicacy that felt dangerous.

“There’s just too much here that’s uninteresting,” she said, still studying the façades. “It isn’t like Europe, I don’t know why Sonny ever came here.”

“He came to smuggle cocaine,” Quinn said, pulling the cab door open. “I doubt if he had time for the sights.”

“I guess that’s right, isn’t it?” she said and got inside.

The cab passed up the Avenue Guerrero along the arts palacio. The side streets were crowded with tourists, and police vans were parked at the palacio gate, officers standing in the street waving machine guns. They were after stolen paintings, and Quinn put his window up. He wanted to get the money without an incident, then have what was left of the day to see Sonny and try to get a word to Zago. That was the only way he could plan it, and the money was crucial. He figured Deats worked for Zago creating dilemmas, since without Deats nothing changed in substance, but with him everything seemed desperate. But he didn’t have to think about Deats anymore. Deats either had his troubles with Zago or he was off the case.

The cab turned up Manuel Ocampo three blocks off the zócalo, and there were soldiers massing. They were deployed on opposite sides of the street in the shadows, looking grey-faced and fidgeting. They had flak vests and riot visors, and had their weapons at sling-arms. Sergeants stood along the curb edges yelling into the lines and counting heads. The soldiers all wore new white canvas puttees below their GIs, and bright orange epaulettes. They were soldiers from somewhere else, with no qualms about shooting locals, since their own families couldn’t be reached. And they were being hidden for a reason, something that would pop up suddenly, and where the usual anonymity wouldn’t be enough.

The cab driver glanced at the soldiers. “Aéreos,” he said and drove past cautiously. Rae fingered the window edge, gazing at the muster.

“What does that mean?” she said.

The only people he could see who were not soldiers were children hawking limes to the sergeants farther up the street. “Airborne,” Quinn said.

“What are they doing?”

“Maneuvers.” He kept his eyes on the direction the cab was going.

She took her glasses off and looked at him, her eyes white-lidded as though she had scrubbed them to get a stain off the skin. “I counted two hundred. That isn’t good, is it?”

“Not our business,” Quinn said.

She smiled. “We’re different, right? Like Carlos said.” She sat back around. “Hands to work. Hearts to God.”

“Forget it,” he said.

“I have a theory, you know.” She was staring at the street. The cab had a painted tableau across the top border of its windshield, a long green pasture with a gold mountain in the distance and a black-haired girl with big tits in a bathing suit, standing at the edge of a lake smiling back into the cab. It gave the driver something to look at, and Rae stared past it as if she couldn’t see it. “Women who marry older men are always grim,” she said. “It’s formulaic.”

“You must have somebody in mind,” Quinn said, watching the street.

“Zago’s wife,” Rae said.

“She’s just another cunt, right?”

“She’s worse,” Rae said. “She’s got busted luck all over her. You can smell it.”