Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

  When the rosary was finished and the other women gone, Luz sat with him in a front pew and tried to explain Catholicism, how it had a comforting, nurturing side to it, in spite of the pope’s insistence on women having as many babies as possible in a country where there were already too many babies riding on the hips of sixteen-year-old girls. The shooter didn’t know much about Catholics, but he’d met a Jesuit priest once in Venezuela and drunk some wine with him. Luz said that didn’t really count, since the Jesuits went their own way most of the time, almost like a separate religion all their own. Her mother had said as much after a Jesuit had come to their village seeking money for his foreign mission one time and gone off pretty much empty-handed but understanding also the people of Ceylaya didn’t have much themselves.

  Clayton Price told her what the Jesuit had said: “”fou don’t preach religion to people with hungry bellies. First you fill the bellies, then you preach religion.”

  Luz replied that sounded right to her, but that a lot of Mexican village priests had never quite grasped the idea. Mostly they prattled on about trusting in the Lord and not practicing birth control, though their attitudes had been discreetly changing in the last twenty years. The pope had come to Mexico once, in an effort to renew their fervor, and the priests had listened to him, but the pope didn’t have to deal with women in the confessional who already had six children and couldn’t adequately provide for them. When the pope left, the priests returned to searching for a fine line between the church’s ideals and the practicality needed if their flocks were going to remain manageable.

  Luz and the shooter left the church an hour before sunset. They walked through the winding paths of the village, past houses set into hillsides. The sound of Maríachis came out of windows and doorways, radios filling the night with the sound of an older Mexico, one that was passing and would never come again. With the music behind them, they followed an old road down to the abandoned silver mines that had once made Zapata a place of treasure for the Spaniards and other Europeans later on. The silver was taken out by mule, each mule carrying two 50-kilo ingots on its way to the sea. Most of the old mining machinery was gone, the Japanese having bought it just before the Second World War. They had come here and hauled the scrap to Mazatlán, shipped it to Japan, and melted it down for the metal.

  Some of the mine entrances were still open, and Clayton Price wanted to go inside, but Luz thought it would be dangerous. He did it anyway while she waited outside. They walked back to the plaza by a different route from the one they’d taken, passing by a house where a young man was cutting an old mans hair in the twilight. The old man sat very still, the younger one talking softly and scissors moving.

  There was only one telephone in the village, in a store near the church. The shooter gave the proprietor money to let him use the phone and made a collect call somewhere. Luz couldn’t hear what he was saying, except for something that sounded like “Tortoise” and then the phrase “LC, silver mine,” which he repeated several times. But she could tell he was angry, and he finished by nearly shouting, “Goddammit, you owe me this!” He slammed the phone down,

  then softened when he looked at her, and they went back to the cantina.

  Earlier this day, after Danny Pastor had left for Mazatlán, Luz María and the shooter had taken a late lunch, sitting in the shade of the cantina’s porch. She’d drunk a margarita and he’d drunk a beer.

  She’d pointed toward the steep hillsides where village men were working. “They say in these hills a man can be killed by falling out of his cornfield.”

  And Clayton Price had laughed at that, the machete cut on his cheek hurting only a little when he’d crinkled his face. There were many ways to be killed; falling out of a cornfield was probably the better of most, though not a way men would choose to die, he’d thought. He’d watched her mouth as she’d spoken and wondered for a moment what it would be like to touch her and wanted to do it right then, except she’d turned and looked back at him with black female eyes appearing as if they might not mind if he did touch her, causing him to pull back. So he’d reached for his beer, looking up at the hillsides again, and pretended he was still smiling at what she had said about farmers tumbling out of their fields.

  From the cantina’s porch, he’d pointed to a house snuggled into the hills about a mile out and had said he wouldn’t mind living there, living a quiet peasant’s life. His eyes had gone lambent, and he’d said he sometimes wished he were five years old again and had the long carpet of innocence before him. That he felt like a lone, wild bird circling the ponds of autumn, looking for a place to land. That he regretted there’d been no Sunday afternoons in the park with children. Or softball games in the evenings, or a wedding in which he’d given the hand of his only daughter. None of that. No quiet rocking on a southern porch at sundown, gin and tonic in hand and savoring a day’s work well done and in which no harm was intended or accomplished.

  He’d told her of a recurring dream in the nights of his life. That he flew from a high trapeze, somersaulting through the air, but the bar where the catcher was supposed to be waiting was always empty. The dream never failed to end the same: he would slam onto the sawdust floor and lie there broken and dying, the audience applauding as it filed from the circus tent.

  Luz had told him again how she wanted to live in the United States, that she’d do just about anything to get to el Norte and have the good things she’d seen on television. He’d asked why Danny didn’t marry her and take her there. And she’d told him Danny had no interest in marrying her or anyone else and heading north with a woman on his arm.

  Clayton Price wasn’t dumb. It was his business to know something about human behavior. And he knew any sustained dance such as the one Luz and Danny had been doing for two years required mutual parasitism, a rough balance of gain and loss by both partners. So it wasn’t merely a case of an alienated and heartless gringo getting what he could from a young Mexican woman. Wasn’t Danny supporting both of them, and wasn’t she living with him and dancing around the tables in Mamma Mia some nights and therefore getting something out of the deal?

  He’d asked her what she knew about the United States. Did she really understand how she’d be treated up there if she was on her own? For that matter, how she’d be treated even if she was hanging out with a gringo and supposing even that gringo had pulled himself together and was making all the education and abilities he had pay off in American dinero?

  She’d thought she understood and tried to explain what she’d do. But he’d said she’d either have to be well funded so she could tell everyone who didn’t like her accent and skin color to go to hell or she’d have to develop a psyche capable of withstanding the kinds of attitudes she’d confront, in some parts of the country more than others. Luz had said that wouldn’t be any problem, that she could handle whatever came up. But she was more than a little naive, and Clayton Price knew it. Still, he’d felt sorry for her, felt that and something more he couldn’t quite lay his mind on at that time, sitting on the cantina porch and talking with her and seeing her all black eyed and female.

  So he’d told her about his place in northern Minnesota, way back in the woods and near the Canadian border, not so far from the town of Grand Marais, lying there quiet next to the cold water where the big ore boats used to run. She could come and stay there if she wanted, if that’s what she really wanted, and he had ways of getting her through the tangle up at Laredo or Nogales or wherever they had to make the border crossing. He lived there most of the time, in that northern land, that’s what he said. What he didn’t say was that he might not ever be able to go back there now, even though he picked up his mail at a town a hundred miles away as a way of protecting the secrecy of his home place. The hunters were smart; they’d find him.

  He had another place, something he’d come across during one of his R&R excursions while he was in the military. On an island off Phuket, five hundred miles south of Bangkok. It was a bungalow on the beach. Paradise, he
called it, and described the easy life you could live there.

  Luz didn’t know where Thailand was, let alone Bangkok, let alone Phuket, but it had sounded wonderful to her.

  He’d looked straight at her and warming to his own words and the way she was looking back at him, and started saying things about the Minnesota cabin in summer along with Phuket in winter. And that had sounded even better to Luz, who’d sat there hearing in her head the whine of big jet engines. And seeing herself paddling through cool northern waters during the summer heat and then wearing flowers in her hair and doing rhumbas on white sand in a far place called Phuket, somewhere south of another place called Bangkok she’d never seen on a map or even heard about at any time in her life. For a woman who’d crawled up out of a small, dusty village named Ceylaya, that wouldn’t be too bad, and she’d leave those village hombres, who’d wanted to put her flat on her back and give her babies when she was fifteen, far gone and choking on her dust. And later on saying the rosary and looking over her shoulder at the gringo standing in the church doorway, she’d thought some more about cool lake water and warm Asian sand and had asked Mary the Virgin to intercede on her behalf and help take her to those places.

  After the rosary and the walk to the silver mines, she sat on the cantina porch again with this man who had called himself Peter Schumann before but who now told her that really wasn’t true and that his name was Clayton Price. She asked him more things about his cabin in the woods and would she need a heavy shawl when the hard weather came and what direction an airplane would go if it were heading for Phuket.

  At the same evening moment as he smiled and told her more than a heavy shawl would be needed, a collective and appreciative moan rose from a group of hombres standing near the cantina. From behind adobe houses and sashaying up the cobblestones out of the east section of the village was a señorita of maybe fourteen and wearing snug faded jeans rolled to her knees and black shoes and even socks that were black also. She was beautiful in the face and just as fine in the body and knew exactly what she had and, unlike Luz María at that age, was not afraid of giving promise to the hombres who continued with their murmurs of approval just loud enough for the señorita to hear.

  The hombres then began making another sound that was kind of low and wet as she smiled at the heavens and passed by. All of them with their eyes followed the swing of her backside as she went to the plaza and sat there with two boys of her own age who were wishing they had enough money to play the Nintendo game at the store near the church. And the men near the cantina still watched her, the young ones uncommitted and searching and also the older ones, who were considering the possibilities of what might come along after she’d had a baby or two by one of their amigos and maybe would start looking for a little variety beyond the range of her husband. And also hoping all the while some rich gringo wouldn’t come drifting through here and see the possibilities himself, offering her for a week or two more than a village man could hope to offer in a lifetime. Maybe offering a trip to the white sands of southern Thailand, maybe that or other things of equal value.

  But village girls with dreams beyond sweeping dirt floors for a lifetime and sustaining a weekly beating from a husband just for good measure, him doing that merely to show who’s boss in the family, have to do what’s necessary. So Luz knew she, herself, was being manipulative and yet at the same time felt genuine things warm and female toward this man, Clayton Price.

  He was talking to her and opening up in the way men have sometimes of talking to women and saying all the things they never say to other men. “I used to feel in control of things, like nothing could touch me if I used my head and played it smart. In the last few years I’ve started to feel vulnerable. Not sure why… age, maybe, maybe age does that to you. You start looking back and see you’re going to leave nothing behind other than a trail of bodies in the jungles and alleyways of the world. Not sorry for what I’ve done, but I’ve got some regrets about what I haven’t done. I would have liked to have a wife and children, now that I think about it, but there was no way I could do what I do and be married. It just wouldn’t have worked, would it? Can’t you just hear it: ’My daddy sells insurance, what does your daddy do?’ ’Oh, my daddy’s a sniper; he shoots people in the back from long distances.’ “

  Luz reached out and took his hand when he said that and thought she could see a little hint of tears in his eyes. But whatever was there dried up fast. He talked on and on about his life, about his boyhood in Brooklyn when he’d wanted to be a mountain man or a pitcher for the old Brooklyn Dodgers, about going out to Minnesota later on. The wound on his face was crusted over and still looked angry. Luz felt deeply sorry for him in some ways and oddly loving toward him in other ways. And something else there was about him that made her both sexually excited and feeling almost submissive, as if he were in control of her and as if she had no choice but to stay with him here or go where he said they should go.

  He spoke to her. “Standing there in the church, listening to you and the others say the rosary, something started to work on my insides. I’ve always thought of myself as hard and untouchable—the marines had a lot to do with it; you had to believe that about yourself to go off into the jungle for a week and lie there in the grass and kill people—but there was something about the women’s voices, and the church, and how you looked with my bandanna tied around your head. For a moment there I was wishing I’d lived my life as a simple farmer, like the men in Zapata who come in from the fields every day and sit on their front steps talking with one another after supper.”

  He’d drunk three beers by this time, and Luz had drunk with him, bottle for bottle, both of them talking and yet watching the teenage lovers around the plaza who came to the benches every night about this hour. Later, after they had eaten white tortillas with slivers of cabrito and salsa, they walked across the courtyard toward their rooms. Luz took hold of Clayton Price’s hand and was surprised at how strong it felt, stronger than she’d thought it would feel since his hands seemed pretty thin just lying on a cantina table. She stopped and looked up at him, the string of colored lights above them. Some lights on, some off, one flickering.

  There was no one in the courtyard to see her stand on her tiptoes and pull the face of Clayton Price toward her, kissing him soft and long and then moving her hands to open his shirt and touch the hair and skin on his chest. He was awkward but kissed her back and touched her hair and stroked it and held it in both his hands, and he did that for a long time as if he’d never touched a woman’s hair before.

  When they came to his room, he unlocked the door and Luz went inside with him. She undressed him and then herself and lay beside him. He was white and angular and less threatening with his clothes off, not seeming as tall and powerful to her. She touched him, and he touched her in a tentative way. She took his right hand and laid it on her breast, thinking all the while of the weapons he’d held in that hand, the index finger pulling triggers, the thumb drawing hammers back. His thumb had a callus on it, and it excited her in a strange way to think that hand was touching her breast.

  And though she did her best, talking soft to him and touching him in all the right places with her hands and mouth, running her fingers along the length of his scars, some of which started on his thighs and moved directly up to his manhood, the shooter was unable to come erect and make love to her. She wanted him to do that, wanted it in the worst way, wanted in some curious fashion to experience making love to a man who could do what he could do with a gun in his hand and make others fall before his strength and skill. She was wet and high sexed, wanting him and feeling sorry for him and feeling controlled by him all at the same time, a woman-mother-child rolled into one.

  But there were parts of him so long neglected, and these being of both mind and body, that even when opportunity and some kind of fluttering desire were there, the whole of them remained less than the necessary sum and were overwhelmed by the prospect. He couldn’t get hard and rolled over on his back
and looked at the ceiling for a long time, then said he wanted to sleep. Luz touched his chest and put her arms around him, sleeping there beside him. When she awakened on Saturday morning, he was gone. She dressed and went outside. He was sitting on a bench in the plaza, looking at the old church, while a woman with a shovel and plastic bag moved around the plaza, yelling, “Vamos!” at wandering pigs and scooping animal dung from the cobblestones.

  And during this time Danny was gone, Luz saw two other things. She’d watched Clayton Price clean the Beretta and said to Danny later on how he’d handled it sure and easy with a quick, light touch. He’d also repacked his knapsack, getting it ready, she supposed, in case they had to get out of Zapata fast. Danny asked her about the gun he’d seen him put in there after he did the shooting in Puerto Vallarta. Luz said there was no gun in the knapsack. So Danny figured the shooter didn’t want to be caught carrying the weapon and must have thrown it away or hidden it in the Bronco. He’d searched the Bronco, but the gun wasn’t there. He asked what else she’d found out, and she said the man’s real name was Clayton Price.

  MONDAYS NEVER COME

  The salvage yard owner was impatient. It was Saturday and a Mexican version of Mother’s Day tomorrow when a fiesta celebrating the Madonna would be held. Danny was searching hard for a fuel pump, while the owner stayed close, haranguing him about getting out and coming back on Monday—“ándele, ándele.” Danny knew Monday would never come. Tuesday would, but not Monday. The hombre would be hung over from the fiesta and probably wouldn’t even open up on “St. Monday,” as it was called in Mexico. “Un momentito, porfavor, encontrar bomba degasolina” Danny kept saying in badly pronounced Spanish, buying time, pawing through parts, climbing under the hoods of old Ford trucks, looking for anything that might work. At the far end of the yard, with bougainvillea growing around it, no less, was a crumpled cousin of Vito, rusting down and looking rougher even than Vito. But under the hood was a fuel pump in reasonably good condition, a little rusty, but looking okay other than that. Danny bought it for two dollars, and, for another ten, picked up two five-gallon gas cans that’d strap on Vito’s rear.