Richard Ford: The Ultimate Good Luck

QUINN KNEW HE NEEDED to get lucky.

Rae was coming from Mexico City in the afternoon, and if they placed the money right, Sonny stepped out of the prisión three days later and disappeared.

Luck, Quinn thought, was always infatuated with efficiency. A Persian proverb said that very thing. And since he’d been in Oaxaca, he’d been efficient to every stinking particular. He’d been efficient, in fact, if he hadn’t been anything else. The only thing he couldn’t be sure about — and it worried him — was if it still ran in his character to get lucky.

In the afternoon he had met an Italian girl in the Portal de Flores. She had wandered out of the park through the street tables as though she was looking for someone in particular, and sat at his table. She smiled when she sat down and turned and looked back up the Portal at the hippies and the blanket beggars and the English tourists having coffees. She looked at him and smiled confidingly, as if he should understand why she was there. Quinn had begun to make it a habit to have no nonessential conversations. Talk was risky. You couldn’t tell what you’d say, and seven months alone had taught him to be quiet. But he didn’t mind sitting across from her. Nobody got pregnant looking. The Portal boundaried the central park with a long vaulted commercial arcade with the interior side open. It was the center of evil and good commerce in Oaxaca. He met Bernhardt in the Portal on the days they went to the prison, waiting underneath the suspended Raleigh package for Bernhardt’s Mercedes to turn the corner into Hidalgo Street. And on days they didn’t go to the prison, he liked to come down in the early evening when the Centro wasn’t full of fresh tourists and the light was chartreuse and less precise and there seemed to be a kind of small impersonal welcoming life in the streets, a sense of confidence that everything you saw was functioning predictably.

The girl was in her early twenties with a round Scandinavian face that didn’t make her pretty, but made her plainness appealing. Her mouth had dark expressive lips. She took a pair of sandals out of her bolsa and worked on the straps awhile without speaking, and finally put them on. Quinn read Excelsior for the ball scores. The girl looked back down the Portal and tried to get the attention of a waiter but couldn’t. She looked at Quinn again and smiled and asked for a cigarette. When she had begun smoking she asked where he was from and he only told her the States. She said, blowing smoke, she was from Milano and had been in Oaxaca a week resting up. She said she had come down from Mexico City with a friend in a van and he had left her and gone, and that she was waiting one more day for him, then taking a bus to San Cristóbal, where she knew people. She had thick brown hair with a green ribbon braided into one thin strand. She thought it was her nicest feature. She kept running the backs of her fingers through it as though it was getting in her way, which it didn’t. She seemed prettier when she talked, and he didn’t mind listening to her. She asked him why he was in Oaxaca, and he said he was a tourist. She told him the best Zapotec ceramics were in the poor pueblos beyond Mitla, and the best dyed woolens were sold in the mountains near Teotitlán, and that the best mescal was made in the fábricas away from town, and that only shit was for sale in the Juárez Market. She asked him how many plaquettes of quaaludes he thought it would be safe to send back to the States in the mail without arousing suspicion, and he told her he couldn’t guess, and she seemed satisfied that the idea didn’t upset him.

Quinn began watching her. She wasn’t Italian, but that didn’t matter. She could be Pennsylvania Dutch for the difference it would make, and moving quaaludes into the States didn’t make you dangerous. He doubted she was even doing it, or she wouldn’t have asked. It was just a way to make life interesting when you’re bored and broke, which he thought she was. She hadn’t made a serious attempt to get a waiter, and was waiting for an offer. He liked the way her face darted up and down when she talked, so that her features turned appealing then plain then appealing again depending on whether she smiled. The change back to appealing surprised him every time, and he kept looking for it. She was the first woman he had talked to in a month, and he wondered which face you’d see late at night and which one you’d remember. Since Rae had left he had a habit of only remembering the bad ones. He asked her if she wanted a mescal and she said she did and smiled.

After an hour the Portal began to empty. The Americans left for cocktails at the Victoria, and the hippies faded away to the sleazy hotels back of the market. It was the time of day he liked best in Mexico, a time he never liked in Michigan. In Michigan things were finished now, but in Mexico action was just beginning again. He wanted to stay until the army band started up in the park, and then he was going to the fights.

The girl stopped talking, as if she hoped something interesting would happen. She asked for another cigarette and sat back in her chair with one arm on the table and watched the park empty of tourists. She had no place to go, that much was clear. She was slumming. But he didn’t know if he should take a chance. Women had been off the routine since he’d arrived. They pushed things out of shape too fast. Everything you relied on could tip. Whole empires had gone over for smaller risks. But sometimes you had to adjust your routine to serve the circumstances, and the circumstances added up that he wanted the girl to stay.

When he had sat for a while without speaking, he asked her if she’d like to go across to the Monte Albán and eat the comida and go to the fights. He had been watching the posters on the comerciales all week, and he wanted to see a fight. He liked Mex fights. He had a memory of the chicos in Michigan, down between the long barracks houses in the cherry groves, north of Traverse City. He would sneak out late at night and stand in the tight circles and watch the slender shirtless boys go bare knuckles in the kerosene light. They were stand-up and correct fights, and the punches drew blood precisely. The boys whispered while they fought in the hot dirt, until one boy couldn’t get up, then everyone in the circle would close and pick him up formally, and file back into the whitewashed houses to get drunk, and he’d be left alone in the dark with his heart pounding. It was always a war, and he didn’t remember cowards. Cowardice seemed as far away as death, and when it was over you felt lucky, even left by yourself.

The girl laughed strangely when he mentioned the fights and glanced around her at the empty tables down the Portal where the waiters were standing motionless. Some street boys had begun to hustle a fat German woman for change. The woman batted her hand at them as if they were flies. Things, Quinn felt, would be starting up again in an hour.

The idea of a fight seemed to confuse her. It wasn’t what she had expected to be offered. Light had died in the Centro in the time she had sat there. The air was cool and plum tinted in shadows along the Portal. Traffic had cleared. The Zapotec women in the plaza had taken their backstrap looms down off the benches and were packing them in bundles. The afternoon was over, and the day, he thought, probably looked different to her now from when she sat down. It was a bad time to have to be alone someplace. He could tell she felt that. The military band had begun to muster below the raised kiosk. The musicians stood patiently, holding their instruments, waiting for someone to unlock the low door. They seemed remote and practical.