“Hey, Edgah,” the man said in a conversational voice.
“Ayuh?”
“Says your momuh fell down on the job wicked bad. Didn’t learn you how to act in p’lite compny.”
Edgar walked around to our side of the car. He was shorter but stockier, in a blue wool watch cap that showed red hair in the back. “What I been tellin’ you all these yeahs?” the first man said.
“He should talk,” Edgar said to me. “Just he’s bettalookin.”
We could hear the passenger door open, and Kate got out and walked barefoot and tousled around the back of the car in the truck’s blazing blue headlights. The skirt of the gray silk dress was wrinkled, and the hem rode up. Nobody said anything for a little while, and then Edgar whistled. “Uh-oh. Warren, I hev to say I’m a little shawcked.”
Warren didn’t say anything.
“Guess this fella never heard the song,” Edgar said. “Fif-teen, six-teen, seven-teen …” He stopped and grinned. “What’s that, bub? You know?”
Kate looked fragile and scared, a little girl inside her grown-up dress.
“That’s jay-ul baaayt.”
I felt my left fist connect cleanly with Edgar’s right cheek and my right connect cleanly with his chin. Edgar went down. I’d moved so fast I hadn’t had time to think, but now I thought wow! Strong arms went around my arms and body from behind, and I watched Edgar getting slowly to his feet, shaking his head.
Edgar walked up to me with a serious, intent expression, set himself, and aimed a punch at my stomach. I heard a girl scream, and I thought, Shit! My stomach imploded, air bellowed out of my lungs, something smashed into my front teeth and then clubbed down on the back of my head.
The first thing I did when they got me back on my feet was feel my teeth. By some miracle they were still there. I wiggled them gently at first, then harder, but they were still firm. I looked at Kate’s horrified face and smiled. Warren reached me a pint bottle of Jack Daniels—I took a swig, washed it around inside my mouth, and swallowed it. I took another. There was a kind of hush, as if they all expected me to collapse again, but I stayed on my feet. The back of my Glen plaid suit felt wet and muddy.
Then Warren was helping me into the cab of the truck. Kate climbed in beside me and Warren went around and got into the driver’s seat while Edgar jumped onto the truck bed behind and tapped on the rear window. The big engine roared, and we started moving slowly backward as the Ford faded into the fog. We were on our way to Warren’s place: his girlfriend was a nurse who could tend to my cuts and bruises, give us some food, and we could spend the night on the couch and in the spare room.
Hours or minutes passed, and we were pulling into a foggy driveway with the little house looming in the headlights. The front door opened, and a long-haired woman in a sleeveless teal fleece over a black turtleneck and jeans came out onto the stoop and slowly put one hand on her hip.
The woman’s clear gray eyes moved from me to Kate and back again while Warren explained how he and Edgar had been checking the marsh road to West Beach for deer and had found us stuck.
“Floundering in the mud?” She had a little smile, but she didn’t have a Downeast accent. There was something about the way she said “floundering,” a kind of gentle irony, that caught my ear.
“Do you write, by any chance?” I asked.
I made the trip back to New York in jeans and a striped snap-button cowboy shirt borrowed from Warren. The signed contract specifying an advance on sales of fifty thousand dollars to the writer and world rights to the publisher was in my briefcase—she’d been so embarrassed that her boyfriend had beat me up, she would have signed anything. She had ironed the gray silk dress, and Kate looked fresh as a jonquil sitting beside me in the Legal Seafood branch at Logan Airport, waiting for the shuttle. I had ordered Champagne and oysters, Perrier for Kate.
When the Champagne arrived, I lifted my glass: “Here’s to you. And to Edgar. Without the two of you, this whole thing would never have worked out.”
“No, no. You made it happen.” She put her hand on mine. “You did. I was so proud. You were like … I don’t know, I don’t want to be trite. You came to my rescue.”
We didn’t get back to Manhattan till around 9 p.m., what with one thing and another. When I told the driver to stop first at Kate’s aunt’s address on West 86th Street, she said faintly, “Please can I come home with you?”
The light in the backseat of the cab was too dim to see her face properly. “What?” Had I known this was coming?
She just laid the side of her head against my shoulder. “Please. Don’t I deserve it?”
She had no idea how close I was to my inner sixteen-year-old, who would have said fine, come home, we’ll curl up together. Like I might have said to my sister.
I had to wrench myself away from him. “You deserve a lot. But a girl your age does not go to an older man’s apartment and spend the night.”
“Who’d know? I’ll call my aunt and tell her we were delayed, had to spend the night in Boston. Please?”
“Out of the question,” I said in my totally phony grown-up’s voice. Though it didn’t sound so phony anymore.
Buena Suerte
So tell me, are you pregnant?” Marco grinned. They were in his truck, driving to the customs house in La Paz where she had to sign for the engine parts, which had finally arrived a month and a half after they’d been ordered. Early August … how time flew!
“Heaven forbid.” Wendy had just gotten back from a surf surfari to the East Cape with Clamato and one of his old surf-hero buddies. Clamato had told her she was a natural, picked it up faster than any woman he’d ever seen, but the main idea had been to get away from Marco for a while. “Why do you ask? Is it supposed to be funny?”
“The surf was mierda. Clamato has some friends in Los Frailes. We hung out with them a lot. And ate. I guess I put on some pounds.”
He reached out and squeezed her nearest breast. “Looks like it all went into one place.” He had a crescent-shaped red scar on his forearm.
The squeeze was painful, and she pulled his hand away. “Marco, I’ve done a lot of thinking while I was gone, you know? Mostly about you. Us, that is.”
“Ay caramba.” Marco gave a falsetto howl.
August was the rainy season, and the brown desert was now lush and green. Leaves had burst out of the scrub, fruit out of the cactus, huge yellow flowers out of the big cardons. She watched it through the open window as the truck clattered along. The sun was bursting through the damp air.
“Well?” Marco asked. “What have you come up with?”
“I’ve been thinking about the basis for our … ah … mutual attraction, you know?”
“Mutual attraction. Is that what it is?”
“Well, what else would you call it?”
“I don’t know. It’s your language. You can pick the words better than me.”
“Okay, try Spanish. I can speak it pretty good now.”
Marco grinned. “What about lujuria?”
“Well, there’s not much luxury involved, is there?”
“Lujuria doesn’t mean luxurious.”
“What does it mean then?”
“Look it up,” Marco said. “In your little yellow Cassell’s. But anyway, what were you going to say? About the basis?”
She took a deep breath and crossed her arms. “You are an angry man, Marco Blanco.”
“What?” The truck swerved slightly. “Angry? I have everything I want, and I’m doing exactly what I want to do. Why would I be angry?”
“I don’t know why. But you are. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“If I am angry, does it scare you?” He tossed his head. “You’re starting to get scared, is that it?”
She uncrossed her arms and touched his scar. “Yes, I’m scared. But not of what you think.”
“You’re not scared of me?”
She rubbed the scar
gently. “No, Marco. I’m scared of whatever it is between us. See, I’m an angry woman.”
He whistled and nodded. “Claro que si.”
“But I’m tired of being angry. I don’t think I want to be angry any more. You know?”
“You are pregnant, aren’t you?”
“In your dreams, maybe. No, I think it started after I finished the book. Maybe that’s why I came here, to kind of rejig my life. You know I have a brother?”
He shook his head.
“Yeah. We tried to run away to Mexico together when we were kids. I haven’t talked to him for at least ten years.”
“Are you angry at him?”
“It’s a long story. But yeah … at least I was.” She threw her head back and sighed. “I’m tired of it. Marco, I think we should give it a rest.”
The truck clattered on in silence. “Another thing,” she went on. “I haven’t worked since I got here, and my book’s not doing as well as I thought, so my cash flow’s a little shaky. Isabel said I could camp out in her spare room, and I think I’m going to take her up on it.”
He turned and glared. “Isabel! That pinche tortillera. So now it’s you and her, is that it?”
“Of course not. Don’t be crazy. It’s just a free room.”
“Jesus!” Raising his hand in the air, fingers stiff and extended. “Hey, if you’re broke, how are you going to pay for the car?”
“Don’t worry. The car’s been figured into this.”
Chopping the wheel with the edge of that hand. “You know what? I’ve done a lot of work already on that fucking chingadero, and what have I been paid? Nothing. Nada. Ni un pinche peso.”
“I can see what I can scrape up right now. How much do you want?”
“How much do I want? Well, since you and I are just business now, I want the whole thing up front. The whole five thousand.”
“Five thousand? We agreed on three, Marco. That’s what I set aside.”
“Show me where that’s written down. It’d cost you six to have this done in the states. Easy. Ask your mechanic up there.”
“I will. He offered to fly down and do the work himself for three. I think I’ll ask him to do that very thing.”
“The hell you will. That car’s in my shop. Nobody is going to touch it until I get paid.”
The truck’s movement was making her nauseated. And she was tired, so tired she felt like crying. God!
“Why are you doing this to me, Marco?” she asked faintly.
The customs house was closed when they got there and wouldn’t reopen till late afternoon. She told Marco she had some shopping to do and headed for the nearest farmacia where she bought a pregnancy home test kit. She strolled with the rest of the tourists along the malecón carrying the kit in an opaque plastic bag, hoping she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew and thinking she should throw it in the nearest garbage can. Buena Suerte, the pink box said. Good Luck. That was the brand name.
She came to a restaurant before she came to a garbage can—a pleasant open-air place across the malecón from the harbor with elderly waiters in white shirts and black pants and a mostly Mexican clientele eating large afternoon meals. She got a table, ordered the sopa de mariscos and a glass of Santo Tomás chardonnay, and went to the ladies’ room.
The ladies’ room was large and clean, with three metal stalls. Sitting inside one, she took out the kit and read the Spanish directions: hold the wick in the urine stream for five seconds, read the results in the little window after three minutes. One pink line, not pregnant. Two, pregnant. The Spanish word was embarazada.
“What a joke,” she thought, holding the slim white wand between her legs. After two pink lines showed up in the window, she threw the whole ensemble into the wastebasket near the door on her way out.
Halfway through her bowl of soup, she found herself wondering if she’d really read it right. Was embarazada one line or two? Had she waited for the right amount of time? She went back into the ladies room and took the wastebasket inside a stall with her.
Yes, the stuff was still there. The two pink lines in the window seemed more thick and solid than before. The pink box featured two illustrations of the window, with each result labeled in blue letters. The word under the illustration with two pink lines was unmistakably embarazada. She wrapped the wand in the opaque plastic baggie and took it back to the table. Buena suerte.
Now the soup was cold. She stirred it listlessly, finished her glass of wine, and waved for another. She’d missed her last period, but she’d been surfing hard in the hot sun. That had probably done it. Wasn’t she due to get one soon? When she got back she’d check her calendar.
Why didn’t she keep track of things more closely? That first time in June, where had she been on the goddamn calendar then? And the other times? The pill was horrible. She’d never used it, and planning any other kind of birth control had been out of the question. She touched the breast Marco had squeezed. Yes, it was sensitive, but then they always were just before her period. It was coming, just as Miss B had assured her it would, for the next forty years. My heart and my door are closed to you.
The sun was setting by the time they’d found the right man at the customs house, gotten through all the paperwork, paid the fees, and loaded the box of parts into the truck. Marco said there was a place outside of town on the way back that had good food, music, even a dance floor if they felt in the mood.
“I have to say I don’t really feel in the mood,” Wendy said. She’d checked the wand one more time before throwing it away for good. No change.
“No problem,” Marco said. “I’m not much of a dancer anyway. As you know. But it’s a friendly place. I go there a lot. They make a good enchilada.”
They turned down a wide dirt road through the desert scrub, potholed with heavy traffic. There were rustic hitching rails in front of three large buildings and a few cars. They stopped at the middle one, Mi Ranchito, in large lit-up letters.
It was a huge dim cavernous space like one of the old New York discos, tables on a raised platform around the dance floor, a stage with microphones and loudspeakers. Men were sitting at some of the tables, and girls were standing around dressed in gringo-style clothes like short cutoffs and tight tee shirts. The lighting was reddish.
A large woman came up and talked to Marco in Spanish so fast Wendy couldn’t follow. They were like old friends. She led them to one of the tables, sat down with them, and leaned over at Wendy. “The music playing right now very soon,” she said in English. “‘Volver!’ You know?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You dance good, he tell me. You—”
Wendy pointed at Marco. “But not him. He doesn’t dance at all.”
“Híjole!” She slapped Marco on the hand. “Que mentiroso.”
“Do you have a menu?”
“Menu?”
“I hear you have great enchiladas.”
The woman laughed and laughed. “Enchiladas! Ay, Dios.” She waved at the girls lined up against the wall. “There they are, mija! Which flavor you want? The mango?”
Marco leaned over and said something to her, pointing to one of the girls. The woman smiled and nodded. “Excuse, mi amor, okay?” She went over and said something to the girl.
“What is this place, anyway?” Wendy said. As if she didn’t know.
Marco just smiled and nodded. The musicians came on, and when they struck up the number the girl he’d pointed at came over to their table. They went to the dance floor together and did a pretty good waltz, Mexican style. They were the only couple on the floor.
When it was over, the girl came back to the table with him, and he introduced her as Miel. “Miel and I are in business too. Like you and me. We have a small transaction to see about, maybe fifteen minutes. Wait for me, okay?”
She pretended to watch the band after Marco followed Miel out of the room, but she could feel the eyes. Girls giggling behind their hands, heavyset middle-aged men tapping their toes and pretending to
be looking at something just behind her.
So this was the worst humiliation he could come up with. On short notice, of course. Before, she would have been angry, but now she was truly scared. She should never have broken off with him until she’d gotten her precious car back. Just a week. Couldn’t she have put up with him for just another week?
Red hot struggle, blood, bruises, harsh panting in the dark. She’d wanted it before. She’d sought it out. She shivered and looked around the huge dim hall, and all the eyes looked back with interest and amusement.
“Ay Dios!” Isabel’s eyes got big. “So when was supposed to be your regla?” They were sitting cross-legged opposite each other on the floor of Isabel’s little white spare room in back of her studio. A campesino-style canvas cot was the only piece of furniture.
“About three weeks ago. Maybe more. But my reglas have never been very regular.” She’d decided not to mention the pregnancy test.
“No, no, querida. I can see the difference.”
Wendy put her hand on her stomach. “You mean I’m showing? Impossible. I’ve just put on a little weight.”
Isabel touched one of her own breasts. “How do they feel?”
“Big. Sore. Like I’m about to get it.”
Isabel reached out her hand. “May I? I have some experience here.”
“Just be careful, okay?”
She felt the same breast that Marco had squeezed, and Wendy couldn’t help flinching. “What?”
Shaking her head slowly. “You don’ feel sick?”
“Not really. Just a little tired.”
“And Marco?”
“Well … he did ask. I told him no, naturally.”
“So that thing in the ranchito had nothing to do with this?”
“No. He was just pissed because I told him I wouldn’t sleep with him anymore.”
“You think he’s gonna finish your car?”