James Cain - Serenade

“I hope you’re not afraid, Señor?”

He didn’t like that so well. The red began to creep up again, but then I felt something behind me, and I didn’t like that so well either. In the U.S., you feel something behind you, it’s probably a waiter with a plate of soup, but in Mexico it could be anything, and the last thing you want is exactly the best bet. About half the population of the country go around with pearl-handled automatics on their hips, and the bad part about those guns is that they shoot, and after they shoot nothing is ever done about it. This guy had a lot of friends. He was a popular idol, but I didn’t know of anybody that would miss me. I sat looking straight at him, afraid even to turn around.

He felt it too, and a funny look came over his face. I leaned over to brush cigarette ashes off my coat, and out of the tail of my eye I peeped. There had been a couple of lottery peddlers in there, and when he came over they must have stopped in their tracks like everybody else. They were back there now, wigwagging him to say yes, that it was in the bag. I didn’t let on. I acted impatient, and sharpened up a bit when I jogged him. “Well, Señor? Yes?”

“Sí, sí . We make lotería!”

They broke pan then, and crowded around us, forty or fifty of them. So long as we meant business, it had to be hands off, but now that it was a kind of a game, anybody could get in it, and most of them did. But even before the crowd, the two lottery peddlers were in, one shoving pink tickets at me, the other green tickets at him. You understand; there’s hundreds of lotteries in Mexico, some pink, some green, some yellow, and some blue, and not many of them pay anything. Both of them went through a hocus-pocus of holding napkins over the sheets of tickets, so we couldn’t see the numbers, but my man kept whispering to me, and winking, meaning that his numbers were awful high. He was an Indian, with gray hair and a face like a chocolate saint, and you would have thought he couldn’t possibly tell a lie. I thought of Cortés, and how easy he had seen through their tricks, and how lousy the tricks probably were.

But I was different from Cortés, because I wanted to be taken. Through the crowd I could see the girl, sitting there as though she had no idea what was going on, and it was still her I was after, not getting the best of a dumb bullfighter. And something told me the last thing I ought to do was to win her in a lottery. So I made up my mind I was going to lose, and see what happened then.

I waved at him, meaning pick whatever one he wanted, and there wasn’t much he could do but wave back. I picked the pink, and it was a peso, and I laid it down. When they tore off the ticket, they went through some more hocus-pocus of laying it down on the table, and covering it with my hat. He took the green, and it was half a peso. That was a big laugh, for some reason. They put his hat over it, and then we lifted the hats. I had No. 7. He had No. 100,000 and something. That was an Olé . I still don’t get the chemistry of a Mexican. Out in the ring, when the bull comes in, they know that in exactly fifteen minutes that bull is going to be dead. Yet when the sword goes in, they yell like hell. And mind you, there’s nothing as much like one dead bull as another dead bull. In that café that night there wasn’t one man there that didn’t know I was framed, and yet when the hats were lifted they gave him a hand, and clapped him on the shoulder, and laughed, just like Lady Luck had handed him a big victory.

“So. And now. You still look, ha?”

“Absolutely not. You’ve won, and I congratulate you, de todo corazón . Please give the lady her ticket, with my compliments, and tell her I hope she wins the Bank of Mexico.”

“Sí, sí, sí . And so, Señor, adiós.”

He went back with the tickets, and I put a little more hot leche into my coffee, and waited. I didn’t look. But there was a mirror back of the bar, so I could see if I wanted to, and just once, after he had handed her the tickets, and they had a long jibber-jabber, she looked.

It was quite a while before they started out. I was between them and the door, but I never turned my head. Then I felt them stop, and she whispered to him, and he whispered back, and laughed. What the hell? He had licked me, hadn’t he? He could afford to be generous. A whiff of her smell hit me in the face, and I knew she was standing right beside me, but I didn’t move till she spoke.

“Señor.”

I got up and bowed. I was looking down at her, almost touching her. She was smaller than I had thought. The voluptuous lines, or maybe it was the way she held her head, fooled you.

“Señorita.”

“Gracias , thanks, for the billete.”

“It was nothing, Señorita. I hope it wins for you as much as it lost for me. You’ll be rich — muy rico.”

She liked that one. She laughed a little, and looked down, and looked up. “So. Muchas gracias.”

“De nada.”

But she laughed again before she turned away, and when I sat down my head was pounding, because that laugh, it sounded as though she had started to say something and then didn’t, and I had this feeling there would be more. When I could trust myself to look around, he was still standing there near the door, looking a little sore. From the way he kept looking at the damas , I knew she must have gone in there, and he wasn’t any too pleased about it.

In a minute, my waitress came and laid down my check. It was for sixty centavos. She had waited on me before, and she was a pretty little mestiza , about forty, with a wedding ring she kept flashing every time she got the chance. A wedding ring is big news in Mexico, but it still doesn’t mean there’s been a wedding. She pressed her belly against the table, and then I heard her voice, though her lips didn’t move and she was looking off to one side: “The lady, you like her dirección , yes? Where she live?”

“You sure you know this dirección?”

“A paraquito have told me — just now.”

“In that case, yes.”

I laid a peso on the check. Her little black eyes crinkled up into a nice friendly smile, but she didn’t move. I put the other peso on top of it. She took out her pencil, pulled the menu over, and started to write. She hadn’t got three letters on paper before the pencil was jerked out of her hand, and he was standing there, purple with fury. He had tumbled, and all the things he had wanted to say to me, and never got the chance, he spit at her, and she spit back. I couldn’t get all of it, but you couldn’t miss the main points. He said she was delivering a message to me, she said she was only writing the address of a hotel I had asked for, a hotel for Americanos . They must like to see a guy framed in Mexico. About six of them chimed in and swore they had heard me ask her the address of a hotel, and that that was all she was giving me. They didn’t fool him for a second. He was up his own alley now, and speaking his own language. He told them all where to get off, and in the middle of it, here she came, out of the damas . He let her have the last of it, and then he crumpled the menu card up and threw it in her face, and walked out. She hardly bothered to watch him go. She smiled at me, as though it was a pretty good joke, and I got up, “Señorita. Permit me to see you home.”

That got a buzz, a laugh, and an Olé .

I don’t think there’s ever been a man so moony that a little bit of chill didn’t come over him as soon as a woman said yes, and plenty of things were going through my head when she took my arm and we headed for the door of that café. One thing that was going through was that my last peso was gone at last, that I was flat broke in Mexico City with no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to do it. Another thing was that I didn’t thank them for their Olé , that I hated Mexicans and their tricks, and hated them all the more because the tricks were all so bad you could always see through them. A Frenchman’s tricks cost you three francs, but a Mexican is just dumb. But the main thing was a queer echo in that Olé , like they were laughing at me all the time, and I wondered, all of a sudden, which way we were going to turn when we got out that door. A girl on the make for a bullfighter, you don’t exactly expect that she came out of a convent. Just the same, it hadn’t occurred to me up to that second that she could be a downright piece of trade goods. I was hoping, when we reached the main street, that we would turn right. To the right lay the main part of town, and if we headed that way, she could be taking me almost anywhere. But to our left lay the Guauhtemolzin, and that’s nothing but trade.