The Terror of Tijuana

by S. J. Varengo

  “Is Pappy the eager one, or might it be you?” Dan asked, laughing as he stepped through the door.

  “Perhaps we’re equally excited.”

  They moved into Neal’s comfortable drawing room and Dan saw that two glasses of the welcoming brown elixir were already poured and waiting, a little impatiently, it seemed to him. He took one, sat in one of the many comfortable chairs in the room, and lifted his glass to Neal. “To our mutual Pappy!”

  “Hear hear!” said Neal. Although both men preferred to sip their bourbon, it had become their tradition to toss the first one back all at once, which they did. There followed a chorus of wordless expressions of delight, and Neal finally said, “Well, you just drank about $300 worth of bourbon.” He refilled their glasses.

  “You say that every time we drink this shit,” Dan said.

  “I’m trying to keep you fiscally responsible. You’re a retiree, you know. Fixed income and all that rot.”

  “In order for it to be fixed, wouldn’t it have to have been broken first?”

  “‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’” Neal laughed.

  “I wonder who said that first,” Dan mused as he raised the cut crystal tumbler to his mouth, sipping and savoring this time.

  “I forget,” Neal said. “Either Socrates...” Neal paused to lift his glass in another toast, “or Yogi Berra, the wisest of them all.”

  “You and your damn Yankees,” Dan said, not bothering to hide his disgust. Even having said the name made his mouth feel dirty. He rinsed it quickly.

  “Listen. When Yogi was a kid in St. Louis, he failed a quiz and his teacher asked him, ‘Lawrence, don’t you know anything?’ Yogi said, ‘I don’t even suspect anything!’ True story. And anyone who knows that he knows nothing is truly the wisest of men.”

  Dan thought about that for a moment, then lifted his glass. “To Socrates.”

  “Who hurt you, Dan?” Neal laughed. “That level of Yankee-hating has to harken back to a difficult childhood, perhaps involving being sent to find a switch, followed by a visit to the woodshed?”

  “No, it doesn’t harken back to any such thing, Neal. It just points to having grown up in Colorado and having a dad who was a Cardinals fan. There were no Rockies in those days.”

  “No Rockies! Dan, you’re much older than I first thought. The Rockies were formed eighty million years ago.”

  Dan laughed. “You’re a nut, Neal.”

  “Probably why we hit it off.”

  Dan looked at his glass and realized he’d emptied it once more.

  “Pour yourself another three hundred dollars’ worth.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Dan. “So tell me about your Indiana Jones business.”

  “What do you know about the Olmec civilization?”

  Sipping the bourbon, Dan scoured his memory. “Ancient Mexican people, considered the precursor to all the Mesoamerican cultures that followed, including the Aztecs and the Mayans.”

  “Exactamundo.”

  “That’s not real Spanish.”

  “Besides the point. I was reading the news online the other day, and there is a small excavation going on in Baja, California. The archaeologists are pretty certain it’s Olmec.”

  “Hmm,” Dan said as he called up the ghosts of college anthropology electives. “If I remember, they were mostly much further south, down around the Gulf.”

  “How does a software engineer turned business mogul know this?” Neal chuckled, holding his glass out to Dan. “Three hundred dollars’ worth, please.” Dan poured, Neal sipped. Then he said, “But you’re absolutely right. If this indeed turns out to be an Olmec settlement, it will be the farthest north and west discovered so far.”

  “Since when are you into archaeology?”

  “I’m into batteries.”

  “That I knew, but I’m failing to see the connection.”

  Neal grinned and reached beside his chair, grabbing a MacBook that was hiding there. He opened it, and after a few seconds, turned it to face Dan. “Look at this.”

  Dan screwed up his eyes to look at the picture, having left his readers in the car. “What is it? Looks like a couple of dirty vases.”

  Neal handed him the computer. “Here. Look closer, squinting old man. Doesn’t that remind you of anything?”

  Dan took the laptop and looked again. “Oh! I see. It looks a little like that ‘Bagdad battery.’”

  “Right. Only here there are two.”

  “They would need a very large flashlight.”

  “Har-dee-har. But don’t you see the significance, Dan? If these are batteries that moves the discovery of electricity and its usefulness back to no later than about 400 B.C.E. The one in Bagdad, depending on who you listen to, can be no earlier than 250 B.C.E.”

  “So battery history is set squarely upon its ear.”

  “History does not have ears,” Neal said as though this was the most important point he’d yet made.

  “Okay, so I follow that this may be a battery, and that your gig is batteries. But I don’t really think reading a news article online counts as ‘Indiana Jones business.’”

  “I’m going to see firsthand.”

  “What?” Dan sat forward, handing the computer back to Neal.

  “I’m going.”

  “What?”

  Neal’s face morphed into a bemused grin. “Say what again.”

  “What?”

  “You’re pronouncing it w-haat.”

  “That’s Pappy talking.”

  Neal seemed to forget what they were talking about for a second, then announced, as if for the first time, “I’m heading to the dig site. It’s only about a seventeen-hour drive.”

  “That’s driving straight with no pee stops,” Dan said, shaking his head.

  “I’ll bring a jug.”

  “Gross. Okay, so you can take care of that problem. How are you going to deal with driving for seventeen hours without sleep?”

  “Dan, Dan, Dan,” Neal said in his most patronizing tone. “Are you unable to stay awake for seventeen hours? From what you’ve told me, that was your average work shift for many years.”

  “Yeah, I put in some long hours at D-Soft, but I wasn’t behind the wheel. If I got bleary, I’d just go to my office and take a nap instead of drifting head on into a pickup filled with some unlucky Mexican family.”

  “You were steering the Ship of Industry!”

  “Maybe, but the risk of driving the Ship of Industry off a cliff is a lot lower than driving your Land Rover to Mexico.”

  “Hmm. You’re right. You know what I need? A copilot.”

  “Check Craigslist. Under copilots.”

  “Why would I do that? Your wife is out of town, your kids are self-sufficient, and the Ship of Industry is being steered by other hands now.”

  “I wanted to golf tomorrow.”

  “It’s supposed to rain.”

  “I don’t know, Neal.”

  “Listen, I’ll do as much of the driving as I can myself.”

  “Neal. I just don’t…”

  “I’ll let you listen to the Rockies game on SiriusXM,” Neal said, making his voice into a lilting singsong that Dan figured was supposed to make it sound all the more enticing.

  “Alright, alright! I’ll go. I’ll need to pack some clothes and grab my passport.”

  “Fine, let’s go. We’ll drop your car home and you can grab your clothes and makeup.”

  “Bite me. Wait, you want to leave now? It’s after eleven. It’s almost time for Colbert, and he’s got Bernie Sanders on tonight.”

  “Stop with your socialist jibber-jabber.”

  “Neal, the fact that you just used the word jibber-jabber makes me think you shouldn’t drive. Besides,” Dan said, pointing to the bottle of Pappy, which still contained about six hundred dollars’ worth, “I thought you said we were killing this.”

  Neal picked up the bottle and drank directly from it, draining it in an Herculean show of bad decision-making. �
��There. That problem is sloved.”

  “You mean ‘solved,’” Dan said, shaking his head.

  “Hmm. Maybe you better take the first driving stint.”

  “I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Alright, then. Here’s how it’s going to go. I’ll leave my car here and we’ll drive the Rover to my place. I’ll grab what I need, and if the kids are up, I’ll fill them in and have them swing by tomorrow and bring my car home. Then we’ll head to Baja California and your Olmec triple-As.”

  “Probably more like double-Ds,” Neal said, looking at the picture once more. “Wait, are we talking batteries or bra-sizes?” His impish expression of adolescent humor and unbridled excitement caved the last trace of Dan’s wall of resistance.

  “I’m guessing you’re already packed?”

  “Everything’s already in the Rand Lover.” They stood, Dan considerably more steadily than Neal, and walked outside.

  Neal threw the keys to Dan but missed him by about six feet. He found them in the lawn after a brief search and said, “Yeah, I’m definitely driving. But listen, I just thought of something. Do you have any connection to the dig? Because I doubt they’ll just let us move into one of their tents. If the location is remote, we may end up sleeping in your car.”

  “Nah, it’s just south of a major metro.”

  “Which one?” Dan asked.

  “Tijuana,” Neal said, settling into the passenger’s seat and leaning it back to about forty-five degrees.

  Dan started the Land Rover, put it into drive, and headed toward his house. “To Tijuana, then!” he said loudly.

  “Quiet down,” Neal said. By the time they reached Cook Street, he was snoring like the unholy offspring of a buzz-saw and a pipe-bomb.

  7

  The Falling into Place of the Final Improbable Puzzle Piece

  While Dan was far less inebriated than Neal, he was aware that although he was on a long, mostly straight highway in the middle of the night, driving safely didn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t get pulled over before he would no longer have to worry about what a breathalyzer might have to say about his ability to legally operate a motor vehicle. Being a lot closer to sixty than he was to sixteen, Dan knew they had made a collaborative bad decision, but he was committed now.

  And he was in Utah. By managing to walk, or rather drive, the fine line between fast enough to eat some road but not fast enough to light up any unseen radar, Dan had gotten them a few hundred miles out of Denver by the time Neal woke with a sound that could have easily come from a dying tuberculosis patient in an 1890s sanatorium.

  “Have you ever considered the possibility that you may have sleep apnea?” Dan asked while Neal was still gasping. The sound of Dan’s voice seemed to move him from one primitive level of consciousness to another. Now he looked at his surroundings with an expression that Wes Craven had been trying to coax out of actors for years. Settling finally on Dan, he managed to sputter some demi-coherencies.

  “What the hell a… in where? Why, even?”

  Dan shot his friend a sideways glance. “I’m going to reserve my answer to that question… those questions, maybe? At least I think they were questions. I’m almost certain. But yeah, I’m not going to answer until I have even a little idea of what you’re talking about.”

  Neal started to speak three times but, Dan believed, heard the words that were about to issue forth in his head, and stopped himself. Finally, he managed to croak, “Where are we?”

  “I-70 in Utah, headin’ south, headin’ west.”

  Neal nodded, as though this was vaguely familiar information. “Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm?” he commented. Then after a pause: “Um, why?”

  “Wow.”

  Neal was gradually regaining his powers of speech, but his fine motor-skills had not yet punched the timeclock. Dan realized this when he glanced toward his friend in time to see what he assumed was intended to be a nose-swipe with his left index finger but turned instead into a full-on, Three-Stooges-worthy eye poke.

  “Jesus son of a…”

  “Easy. We’re in Mormon country. Be respectful.”

  “I just poked myself right in the goddamned eye, Dan!” Neal shouted, as if Dan was somehow missing some important detail.

  “You did! You really did. I’ll testify! ‘I saw the whole thing, officer. His eye was just sitting there, minding its own business, when this madman just reached up and poked it.’”

  Neal sputtered for a few more minutes, but his eye agony and the remainder of his brain fogginess seemed to diminish at the same time. “We’re driving to Mexico, aren’t we?”

  “Ah, the brain damage was not complete! Yes, we’re going to find your Olmec batteries.”

  “And you said we’re in Utah still?”

  “Almost to Nevada. Your car routed us through Las Vegas.”

  “I have it set to do that, no matter where I’m going. Even if it’s just to the store for milk.”

  “Nice.”

  “There won’t be time to stop today, though, even though Wayne Newton still puts on a killer show.”

  Dan looked at his friend, face aghast. “All the entertainers in that town and you pick Wayne Newton?”

  “He’s Mr. Fucking Las Vegas.” After a pause, Neal’s face grew mischievous. “Kind of like Bucky Fucking Dent, you know.”

  “You start talking about the Yankees again and I will turn this car right around, young man!”

  “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Relax.”

  “Good to see your sense… I was going to say ‘your sense of humor’ is returning. But I think I’ll just leave it at ‘your sense.’ When you woke up, I was pretty sure it was just to stroke out or something. You made some very non-homo-sapiens-sounding noises.”

  The two made small talk as Neal gradually finished sobering up. Dan, for his part, had stopped worrying about blowing too high shortly after Neal’s violent resurrection. Off to the east of them, the sky was already showing the first traces of morning, though overhead, it was still dark and starry. Eventually, they passed a sign with a picture of a mounted cowboy superimposed over the words “Welcome to Nevada.”

  Neal clapped his hands then rubbed his palms together like an excited child.

  “We’ve still got a lot of driving ahead of us,” Dan said with a chuckle.

  Neal sat up straight in his seat, arched his back, and stretched all his cramped muscles. Then he shook his head like a wet dog, making some cartoon noise generated by leaving his cheek muscles relaxed as he did. When he stopped doing that, he stretched out his arms and declared, “I’ll take over as soon as you find us someplace to pee.”

  The terrain through which they were passing was full desert, and there had been no sign of another car on the road with them for hours. “Why don’t I just pull over. You can go behind that cactus.”

  “I’m still not sure I’m steady enough to stand that close to a cactus with ‘Little Neal’ exposed.”

  “Fine. Looks on the map like there’s a little junction ahead. Hopefully, they don’t lock all the bathrooms at night.”

  “They better not. Or I will piss on their cacti. Safety be damned.”

  “Right, because at that point, you’re making a statement.”

  “Exactly. There are more important things in the world than personal safety.”

  That statement brought Nicole’s image to Dan’s mind. Neal was obviously being funny, but Cole’s life was a slideshow of the truth contained therein. He imagined her putting her safety aside at that moment.

  After another five minutes, they reached the spot that the GPS map had indicated with a little fork and knife to have some sort of food. There was, in fact, only a gas station/convenience store, but it was open, and Neal made his way to the restroom as Dan topped off the gas, then went inside to order them two coffees in the largest cups available.

  Soon they were back on the road, this time with Neal driving. Dan found himself still
thinking about Nicole and actually toyed with the idea of looking at his phone to see where she was. He pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the lock screen, which was a picture of Cole and the kids from Christmas. Just as he was about to put his thumb on the home button to open it, he looked at the expression on Nicole’s face. The photo had been taken a few days after they’d returned from Bucharest, and he thought he saw something in her eyes that read as trust and thankfulness. She had not expected him to do as well as he’d done on that mission, and although she probably wasn’t trying, a little pride in him seemed to come across.

  He slid the phone back into his pocket and then said, “Are we there yet?” ten times in a row.

  “Jesus. Traveling with kids is the worst,” Neal said.

  J.J. and Tony woke up the next morning to an empty house. Their father had stumbled in late and said he was going on a road trip with his friend. After they were convinced that he was sober enough to make it back out of the driveway, they promised to drive to Aurora and pick up Dan’s Benz.

  “After we pick up Dad’s car, do you want to go to the mall? I need a few things,” J.J. asked as she and Tony climbed into her Jeep.

  “Yeah, why not? Since we’re orphans and all. That’s what orphans do, right? Go to the mall?”

  “The cool ones do,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought I’d gotten you off the whole orphan kick.”

  Tony didn’t say anything for a minute. She glanced at his face and saw some genuine emotion painting the features. Finally, he said, “I guess maybe it’s just a growing up thing, ya know? I mean, yeah, we’re adults now ourselves. We have our own non-shared experiences. I have friends none of you have ever met, as I’m sure you do as well. But part of me still longs for those days when you came home from school and knew the house was going to smell amazing from whatever Mom was cooking, and you knew that Dad would be home at some point, and a lot of times when he did, it was with a new game for us to beta for him. Now you never know if anyone will be there when you walk in. Mom’s gone a lot with Cleanup Crew business, and Dad, if anything, seems busier now than before he retired. You’re in Indiana, I’m in Cali. These few weeks in the summer are the only time we’re all together for any substantial time, and here we are. Orphaned children, recovering our father’s car and then going to the mall. With the other orphans.”