Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

by Robert James Waller

  She’d asked Danny what he thought about the whole religion-God deal. He’d told her she was about as deep as sweat, philosophically, and paid his bar bill. He knew she’d eventually get hustled by some handsome Mexican waiter who’d tell her if he just had a little money, he’d be able to buy a motorboat and make a good living as a fisherman. After he got his boat, he’d beat her around until she took her fouled-up life down the road. It happened all the time.

  But they kept coming down for more, the blondes and redheads and all other colors, divorced or on spring break or bought off by their parents to get the hell out of everybody’s life and smoke their dope or take their troubles elsewhere. A fair number of them came to San Bias. Something to do with pirates, Danny figured, and some strange kind of female yearning for abuse, too. He’d once sat at a beach restaurant south of Puerto Vallarta with a woman who pointed out to the little cove nearby and said, “See all those boats bobbing out there? I think I bought every god-damned one of’em.” She’d been good-looking at one time, but the effects of sustained boat buying for fishermen who formerly had been waiters were showing on her. She’d been broke, and he’d treated her to a fancy tourist drink, for which she’d eventually been more than appreciative.

  The shooter was cleaned up and walking across the Las Brisas courtyard toward Danny and Luz. His jeans and a khaki shirt both were holding a decent press in spite of the evening heat and humidity. The guy knew how to pack, that much was clear.

  They drank in a little restaurant bar attached to the hotel, overhead fans pushing the same warm, damp air around and over them. Since the shooter was buying, Luz drank margaritas, sitting there in her jeans and sandals, white off-the-shoulder blouse. Danny ordered a beer and nursed it, working on staying reasonably alert.

  The shooter took out his Marlboros, offered the pack to both Luz and Danny. Luz said no thank you, and Danny took one, saying, “I stopped smoking two years ago, then started again and quit and started. Now I’m quitting, but bumming.” Mumbling, mumbling crap, said Danny to himself, and telling his mind to get steady.

  After the shooter had lit his own cigarette, he slid the silver lighter toward Danny.

  Danny lit his and handed the Zippo back to the shooter. “How long you been in Mexico?”

  “Few days. Like I said last night, friend dropped me off his sailboat. Got our signals mixed, and he didn’t come back for me.”

  Danny had noticed earlier the heavy bracelet on the shooter’s right wrist but could see it better now. It had a large, deep-blue stone embedded in the silver, and Danny asked if he could take a closer look. The shooter took off the bracelet and handed it to him. Danny was surprised at its weight and said as much.

  The shooter put it back on his wrist and shrugged. “Lots of silver in it, I guess. Bought it in the Middle East.”

  “When you came in by boat the way you did, how’d you check in with immigration?”

  “I didn’t. Didn’t feel like bothering them.” The shooter tilted up his Pacifico, Adam’s apple working as the beer went down.

  ““You don’t have a tourist card, then?” Danny already knew why. No tracks, no evidence he’d been in Mexico. Still, why risk being picked up for something like that, when he could have cooked up false papers? Unless he’d had to come in fast and didn’t have time for paper shuffling.

  The shooter smiled. “No tourist card; only figured on being there a day or two.”

  Luz was staring at the shooter in wonderment and wide in the eyes, looking over at Danny between stares. Danny wasn’t surprised she was surprised. Here was a guy who didn’t like airplanes or traveler’s checks or credit cards or, for God’s sake, tourist documents handed out routinely and generally without question. On the other hand, the odds of having your papers checked in a tourist town were just about zero unless you did something really stupid. If Luz had known what Danny knew, it would all make sense, but she didn’t.

  Danny pushed it, wanted to see what his plans were. “How the hell are you going to get across the border?

  That’s the first thing they want to see, especially at an out-of-the-way place like Sonoyta or whatever it’s called.”

  “I’ll work it out. Turn myself into a stone, have you catapult me over, something like that.”

  Danny thought, Now he’s getting occult on me, runelike. The shooter was grinning, in kind of a viperish way, it seemed to Danny, while he ordered another Pacifico. Luz was still looking, first at the shooter, then at Danny, wondering about the ways of gringo men she’d known and marveling for about the zillionth time at their total concentration on being self-destructive.

  The shooter added a postscript. “Don’t worry about it; I’ll figure something out. It’s not your problem. Just get me within walking distance of the border and we’ll consider it done. I understand mordida” —the bite— “works pretty well, a few bucks in a border official’s hand, that sort of thing. If that fails, you can take me to one of the major crossing points and I’ll slide through at rush hour.”

  He was right. That’d probably work, unless the border cops were looking for someone in particular, someone trying to get back to the United States fast.

  Danny and the shooter ordered the fish special for dinner. Luz went for broiled shrimp in garlic butter. The sound system was playing American Dixieland jazz, out of keeping with the surroundings and some frail and failed attempt at pleasing gringos, making them feel like they weren’t really too far from home. Danny listened to a nice trumpet solo on “Summertime” and ate his fish and brown rice, glancing up now and then at the shooter, who was asking Luz about her life. She was pleased he’d asked; that much was clear.

  She told him what Danny already knew, leaving out certain and significant parts, of course, and finished up by saying, “Danny came in the restaurant where I was working, one night. I liked him right away; he was more polite than most of the men. I remember he was going to order enchiladas, but I told him the chiles rellenos were better, that we had big chiles and big chiles are very good.” She smiled at Danny, but the shooter didn’t seem to be picking up on it, that chiles play a central role in Mexican sexual humor. To be a man and have a big chili is considered a good thing. Danny rolled his eyes and looked out the window.

  The Dixieland band moved into “Muskrat Ramble.” From the small aviary in the hotel courtyard, parrots took up where the trombone left off: shufflin’… shufflin… arrrk!

  Mosquitoes whined on the other side of the screen next to Danny, looking in at his face and neck: “Psst! Hey, you… gringo guy… come outside for just a little while, gringo.” One of the cooks was laughing somewhere back in the kitchen, and the overhead fan turned slowly, reminding Danny of a boozy old song they used to sing about one of the early hangouts in Puerto Vallarta:

  Layin’ around the Oceana,

  Overhead fans and no hot water.

  Drinkin’ tequila and teasing the girls,

  Hustlin’ a fisherman’s daughter.

  Luz was telling the shooter how much she wanted to live in the United States someday. He listened attentively, nodding from time to time, but didn’t say anything.

  The light was fading fast, almost gone.

  FLAMENCO AFTERNOONS

  Four horses and a colt slumbered along Juárez, taking their time. Danny Pastor waited for them to move over, shifted up through the gears, and headed toward the outskirts of San Bias. There he turned east on a road that would take them up to Route 15, the main north-south highway in western Mexico. It was a good morning, mist coming off ponds and rivers and colored amberish by early light. A good morning, a full, bright morning in May, soft and warm and making it seem as if everything might turn out all right.

  Still, Danny was impatient and the opposite of that, all at the same time, flopping around somewhere in the middle ambiguities. In his thoughtful moments he considered what would happen if they were stopped by one or another police outfit, trying to think what he might say about a passenger who carried no tourist card. Ord
inarily that could be worked out with mordida, but it was hard to say what level of interest in gringos of all kinds had been generated by the killings in Puerto Vallarta. Maybe none at all, maybe a lot, maybe it was just being treated as a local problem. The conservative Danny was inclined to head for the border, fast. The other Danny knew he should take his time, get to know the shooter inside out, needed to do that if the story was going to be all it could be.

  The shooter had put on dark green sunglasses and his ball cap, drinking coffee from a paper cup. He was wearing the same clothes as the night before, still reasonably pressed, in spite of the heat and humidity. His eyes were better this morning, not as tired. Danny, wearing green cotton shorts and an old, multiwrinkled ecru shirt with a plain collar, felt rumpled and disorderly compared with the shooter, who had an air of military about him, of neatness and slow, deliberate precision.

  Luz was rested and showed it, smiling, bouncing along in her little space behind the shooter and Danny. She pointed at a long-tailed blue magpie jay flying through the trees to their right, morning light showing for an instant through the translucent blue of the bird’s tail and wings. What could be better for her? Nothing. A pleasant morning and headed for el Norte, where she’d always wanted to go.

  Two bobwhite quail scurried across the highway, running on short, quick legs, then lifted off and flickered into the Guaycoyul palms. Red-flowered trees, yellow-flowered trees. The shooter asked Luz about the red ones, and she replied, “Tabachin, Mexican bird of paradise.”

  They climbed east over the low coastal mountains and could see the Sierra Madre rising up fifty miles ahead of them, across a big valley, and the peaks looking light purple in the haze. Curves and hills, villages waking up, donkey carts and men on horseback driving cattle, schoolchildren walking along the road. Close-up smoke from cooking fires, distant smoke from slash-and-burn farming where hillsides were being cleared. Man along the highway with the two items most common to men walking along rural highways in Mexico: old brown dog and a machete. It was at least eighty and climbing fast. Danny was guessing at something over a hundred later on. Soft morning, flamenco afternoon.

  The Bronco called Vito rolled north through an invisible communications web becoming more intricately dense by the hour, a humming meshwork of unseen words and orders reaching out with the single purpose of finding a man known as Tortoise. After refueling in San Antonio, the Learjet out of Andrews had landed in Puerto Vallarta twenty-four hours ago. As instructed by the tower, the plane had been parked near a row of Mexican military aircraft at the edge of the airport. Walter McGrane and his compadres were picked up by a white Dodge van and taken away without passing through immigration or customs. Two hours later, heavily armed men had begun spreading out from various posts in Mexico, covering airports and bus terminals and railroad stations, riding through the countryside in trucks and vans. All of them on the watch for a man who’d cut down two people in Puerto Vallarta. And all of them had the same instructions: If Clayton Price was spotted, report in, but do not engage. Repeat: Do not engage.

  Walter McGrane sat near the roar of a window air conditioner in the Puerto Vallarta police station, drinking coffee and trying to guess which way Clayton Price was headed. Weatherford and the other man were in the next room, speaking Spanish to each other, monitoring reports from the field. Nothing, so far. But something would turn up. It always did. And when it did, they would find Clayton Price and kill him and go home.

  The shooter hadn’t said anything since they’d left the Las Brisas, as if he were thinking hard and deep, though twice he’d turned to glance at Luz. At a little past nine they hit Route 15. Danny turned left with America-the-beautiful three days north of them. A Pemex station came up, and Danny filled both the front and rear tanks of the Bronco, put in a quart of oil. The attendant had tried the old gas-pump trick, neglecting to ratchet the dial back to zero before he stuck the nozzle in the Bronco. Danny’d caught him at it, put his hand on the attendant’s arm, and pointed at the gauge. The attendant had merely shrugged, as if he’d forgotten that nicety in the process of providing good, fast service.

  Little villages rolled by, some of them near the road, some a half mile or so on either side, hot and dirty and rough as hell. Ragged wash on clotheslines, brown dogs asleep in the shade, burros wandering around.

  “Damn, that’s tough living,” Danny said, trying to make conversation. “Those places are pits.”

  The shooter looked and said nothing. He’d seen dusty little villages all over the world and had squatted in them and had eaten with his right hand when the villagers had something to spare. He’d always paid for what he’d eaten, unless it was the village custom to make travelers comfortable and where payment would be an insult. He’d eaten monkey and snake and bird and dog and croc and things in brown stew that floated greasy and fat, wondering if the greasy fat things also wondered about what their happy life had come to. Stew had a way of abolishing identity, mercifully so.

  Passing by Santa Penita, an especially bad-looking potpourri of houses and dirt streets, Danny shook his head, glad he wasn’t living there in heat and dust. No matter where he was headed, it would never come to that.

  “I grew up in a village just like that one, lived in a house just like those, went to a little adobe school like the one we just went by.” Luz was kneeling between them, looking out the windshield. “Danny, it’s unkind to say and think such things. These are poor people; life is very hard for them.”

  She’d heard it before—gringo superiority, tourists open-mouthed and aghast at how the po’ folks live and why doesn’t somebody do something about it, and what happens to all that foreign aid we send? That sort of bullshit clucking.

  Danny turned to her. “You’re right. Sorry.”

  The shooter was thinking along the same lines. “Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, you know. Americans born into luxury’s cradle, then escaping it by running down here looking for meaning because all the crap we buy somehow doesn’t cut it for us. And while we’re looking, we’re bitching about the sanitation setup of a destitute Mexican village. Ever strike you we’re nuttier than hell, Danny Pastor?”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Along with that, I remember the writer Carlos Fuentes saying all gringos look alike to Mexicans and our language sounds like Chinese to them.”

  The talk about place had given Danny an opening. “Where you from, originally?” He pretended to concentrate on driving, giving the impression he wasn’t all that interested.

  “Brooklyn, Seventh Avenue. Area called Park Slope.”

  “You grow up there?” Danny had a deep-down sense the quiet man was in a mood to talk.

  “Partly. My father pulled out when I was ten.” The shooter looked over at him, a kind of dark rain moving across his face.

  He was calling up old images, bad things that happened. His voice took on that color and sounded distant, maybe lonely, maybe all of that and something more. For a moment Danny thought the conversation was over, but the shooter went on. “Don’t know why he left. Never did understand it. Just left. My mother couldn’t take care of both of us, so she sent me off to live with her mother and father in northern Minnesota. The ol’ man drank a lot. My grandmother was pretty nice, but they were in their seventies by that time. Not ready to take up being parents again.”

  Danny was surprised at what the shooter was saying, talking personal stuff, perfect background information and context for the events of two nights ago. “Minnesota sounds pretty good. I went through there once. Lots of water, clean.”

  “It’s all right. When the ol’ man was off the bottle he taught me to hunt and fish. Did a lot of that. All of ’em are dead now, my mother included.”

  Danny bored in. “Ever see your father again… after he left?”

  “Once. He and my mother got back together again and came down to Parris Island when I finished boot camp. Didn’t have much to say to them… .”

  The shooter let it go, his voice circling down. He lit
a cigarette and watched the dry, flat countryside rolling by, the Sierra Madre tracking along parallel to them forty miles east. A-little farther on Luz said something Danny couldn’t make out over the wind blasting through the Bronco and the roar of a low-geared engine.

  The shooter heard her. “She wants to visit the cemetery where her parents are buried. Says it’s down toward someplace called Teacapán.”

  “Ceylaya.” Luz was nearly shouting, trying to make Danny hear. “My parents are buried there. I have not visited their graves in four years.”

  “Luz, this isn’t any goddamned tour. It’s a long way to the border. Maybe we’ll stop on the way back if it works out and you can visit all the cemeteries you want.” Danny was saying those things, knowing he wouldn’t do it, knowing he’d make up another excuse on the way back. Sometimes you say those things anyway.

  Silver-and-green Pacifico buses, big trucks, long line of them jammed up on a hill, bathing Vito in black exhaust fumes. Then over the Río San Pedro bridge, where a huge chunk was missing from the cement railing on the right. Danny had seen those gaps all over Mexico and always wondered for a moment who and what went over the side and never came back and how long it’d been since they’d done it.

  The shooter was looking at the road map while Danny looked over his shoulder at Luz. She was near to crying, her eyes looking wet and infinitely black in the way they got when she was sad. Danny felt like a real shithead, but there was work to be done. A delivery job, information gathering, lot of work. Besides, he’d never liked cemeteries of any kind. Luz sat in the jumble where she rode, staring west out a side window of the Bronco.

  The shooter folded the map. “If you take a little road out of Escuinapa and run west toward the sea, you go right past Ceylaya.” He unbuttoned his right shirt pocket and took out three hundred dollars American, handed it to Danny. “Let her visit the cemetery, what the hell… hour down to the coast, hour back. We’ll find someplace on the beach for lunch. All right?”