Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

by Robert James Waller

  He took a taxi to the bus station and caught the last bus up to Zapata just as it pulled out. Two hours later, after stopping at most of the little villages along the way, he stepped down to Zapatas cobblestones and headed toward where he’d parked the Bronco, empty gas cans clanking as he walked.

  Luz and the shooter were sitting in the shade of the cantina’s porch and saw him coming. When they started down the street to meet him, Danny held up the brown paper bag and said, “Got it!”

  It took Danny the rest of the afternoon to install the new pump. By the time he finished, he was hot and greasy and generally out of sorts. Luz and the shooter looked fresh after their baths and stood around watching while Danny swore and turned wrenches, finally getting it done and slamming the hood afterward. He started the engine, which still sounded rough and noisy but no worse than it ever had. The three of them took a trial spin around the village, then up on the highway. Fifteen minutes later they returned and Danny said the Bronco would take them onward to wherever the hell it was they were going.

  Leave tomorrow morning, then?

  No. Luz wanted to celebrate the Feast of the Madonna with the villagers, and the shooter had agreed to that.

  “Are you serious?” Danny said, and then described what he’d seen at Concordia, a small army including gringo cops of some kind, and what the hell did the shooter think of that.

  “I’m not surprised. I expected it.”

  “Do they know who you are?”

  “Maybe. Depends on who’s talked to whom. This operations been a little too open right from the start.”

  “I mean, do they know what you look like?”

  “Maybe. The military and other branches of the government have records, keep track of those people who’ve done work for them. Each of us in this business has a certain style—trademarks—no matter how much we try not to have them.”

  The shooter didn’t say anything else except they’d lay low tomorrow and think about pulling out on Monday. Danny recalled what the shooter had said about the Las Noches crowd and their kamikaze lifestyles, and decided about then the shooter had joined them, maybe Luz as well, taking Danny Pastor along as an unwilling accomplice. Danny tried for a moment to think about death wishes but got overpowered by the concept and let it go.

  They had dinner about nine o’clock, and Danny stumbled off to bed, so tired he had trouble going to sleep. Through the window he could see lightning farther back in the eastern mountains. Luz and the shooter were quietly talking somewhere outside, on the balcony. But he couldn’t make out what they were saying. During the night, Danny awakened, chilly and almost shivering. He rolled over to snuggle up against Luz, but she wasn’t there. He was too tired to think about it just then and went back to sleep.

  Danny got up shortly after dawn. Luz’s side of the bed was still empty, and he stood there contemplating the un-wrinkled sheets for a few seconds, trying to figure out what lay in that emptiness. The wind came up, and a soft rain began falling through thin, yellow sunlight. The trees bent, and there was rain across the valleys, and he could see it falling upon the tile roofs and upon the dirt roads and the cobblestone streets of Zapata. And it ran down the tiles and onto the cobblestones and along the streets and moved downward toward the valleys in the way that water goes. Outside his window was a peacock tree, red blossoms wet and dripping. But the serious rains were still several weeks yet to come, and the shower degenerated into a slow drizzle after a few minutes.

  By the time he was dressed, the wind and rain had gone completely, mist rising from the valleys. The cantina owner had shown them how to make their own coffee in case no one was tending things early in the morning, which there never was. The pot was half full and still passably warm. He poured a cup and strolled outside. People were already up and moving along the wet streets, carrying flowers and headed in the direction of the little cemetery on the northwest edge of the village. After a while the shooter and Luz came walking from that direction. They’d been up to the cemetery, where Luz had said a prayer for her own mother and both of them sheltering beneath a tree until the rain had passed.

  Did Danny want to go to mass with them?

  What?… Mass, for chrissake?

  He could imagine the shooter kneeling down and making sure the Beretta didn’t show when his pant leg hiked up. But they were serious, and Luz said later Clayton Price had taken off his gun and left it in his room when they went to mass.

  Church bells on a Sunday morning, and the faithful gathered in front of the church, nodding and greeting each other before going inside. Danny sat on the cantina porch and drank coffee, visions of small armies assembling and moving all around them, road by road, village by village.

  Across the plaza he could see the shooter and Luz entering the church, Luz wearing a little straw hat with a black ribbon around the crown and a light yellow dress hemmed just above her knees. The hat had come from a store down the street. A village woman had made the dress for her, working all Saturday afternoon and into the evening to finish it since the shooter had promised double her normal price.

  After a while Danny walked over to the main door of the church and looked in. The priest was holding up a chalice, saying words. The faithful said words back to him. Behind the priest was a huge cross. Crepuscular light slanted through stained-glass windows, coloring orange a suffering Jesús, hanging, crucified. Men die for a variety of reasons, their own or somebody else’s.

  Luz and the shooter were about halfway up on the right side, standing with the rest of the villagers. She reached out and hooked her arm around one of his. Jesús-on-the-cross-above-’em, Danny thought; they looked like the young lovers he’d seen lollygagging around the plaza in the blue, mountain evenings. And he tried again to think about just what the hell kinds of interpersonal transitions were happening and what the hell they were still hanging around Zapata for. And, most of all, why was Danny Pastor still hanging around? Fear, maybe. Something else, maybe. Maybe some kind of allegiance to Luz or, God help him, to Clayton Price and seeing through a bargain to the end.

  When the mass ended, the priest stood at the church door with his acolytes and shook hands with the parishioners as they left. He smiled and spoke to Luz and the shooter. Danny watched him take the hand of Clayton Price and wondered if the slightest trace of cordite might linger on the priest’s hand and if he would smell it later on.

  The cantina owner had told Luz and the shooter about an old Spanish church outside of town, one of many places in Mexico called Guadalupe. A field trip had been planned for later that afternoon. Danny was wallowing in total disbelief by this time and began feeling more than a little mutinous. Mass… Luz and the shooter with arms joined… a field trip—this was dementia, “super-nuts,” as he’d once heard an old physicist say in Las Noches. The physicist had been a member of the Los Alamos team that developed the first workable A-bomb.

  Danny had never known what super-nuts felt like until that afternoon, driving out of Zapata on a field trip with the warriors of springtime surely closing in around them. All they needed was a wicker basket filled with picnic goodies and lemonade, but they didn’t have one. Though, if Luz had thought about it ahead of time, the shooter would have found a wicker basket for her somewhere, maybe had it overnighted from L. L. Bean along with snorkeling equipment and rock-climbing gear.

  The directions to this local Guadalupe were a little vague but workable: Go up on the highway, take the road to Ponuco when you see the sign, drive about six miles northeast along a dirt road hacked out of the mountainside—a road full of good-size rocks and barely wide enough for one vehicle—pull off the road when you come to a river, follow the river upstream on foot.

  When they’d talked to the cantina owner and reconfirmed the directions to Guadalupe, Luz had overheard two hombres in the bar talking about all the soldiers in Concordia. They’d said a massive manhunt was going on all over Mexico for someone who had killed two men in Puerto Vallarta and that the bodies of three federates had be
en found at the Pemex station south of Mazatlán, so the search was being concentrated in this general area. She’d looked worried when she’d told the shooter and Danny what she’d heard. Danny was worried, too, but Clayton Price hadn’t said anything, just chewed on his lower lip slightly while she talked.

  It took them thirty minutes to work six miles back into the mountains. High up they went, thousand-foot drop-offs on the outer edge of the road. Vito climbed, and climbed more, then began a long descent into a deep valley where the river flowed. A Jeep, one of the flashy Baja models loaded with automotive trinkets and decorated with intricate striping, damn near ran them off the road on a blind curve. It looked expensive and new, with a long antenna waving from the rear of it and carrying four Mexican teenagers with bottles of beer in their hands.

  “Pretty fancy Jeep,” the shooter said. “How can someone in these villages afford something like that?”

  “Drugs,” Danny replied. “There’s marijuana grown in commercial quantities all over the backcountry here. Lately the government’s been carrying out one of its periodic crackdowns on drugs, so the dope growers have turned to robbery. That’s the main reason for the increase in bandido activity along the main highways. The dope farmers have forgotten how to do any other kind of farming, or don’t want to do it.”

  They reached the river and parked off the road on a dry portion of the riverbed. Luz still had on her yellow dress and hat, even though this was jeans-and-boots terrain. Her sandals were slippery on the river stones, so she took them off and hopped from flat rock to flat rock. Danny noticed how good her legs looked when she jumped from one rock to another, the yellow dress fluffing up.

  They had to cross the river twice when it turned and cut them off at bluff outcroppings jutting out to the water’s edge. The shooter and Danny crossed on rocks. Luz did the same on the first crossing. On the second the rocks were too far apart for her. The shooter walked back and picked her up, sloshing through the water while she held her sandals in one hand and laughed and wiggled her toes, the dress sliding high up to the tops of her thighs. Danny was starting to feel left out of things. It seemed Luz and the shooter were reaching an understanding at some pretty basic levels. Also, given the fact people were looking for them, there was some kind of psychological denial going on here, only Danny wasn’t tuned in to it. They walked along a dirt path toward an old suspension bridge across the river, Luz humming and the shooter grinning like a schoolboy.

  After thirty minutes of walking and jumping and finally crossing to the other side one more time via a dilapidated suspension bridge, they reached the old church. Though it was hard for Danny to concentrate, thinking as he was about the crunch they were in, he had to admit there was something special about wandering around the remains of a five-hundred-year-old Spanish church in the outback. The church had been built to serve a large mining operation, and the original flumes and sluices and stone structures where water wheels turned were still in place, made of river stone and looking capable of standing for another five hundred years. The roof on the church was gone, but the walls were still in place, and their voices echoed in there.

  “Hola.” The three of them swung around to see an old man coming into the church, dog with him. All of them said hello back to him. The old man said he was known as Don José Fierro and called himself the “Guardian of Guadalupe,” a self-appointed position, Danny guessed. The old man was proud of his church and proud of his job, self-made though it was, showing them around and fetching an old newspaper clipping with a picture of him standing in the middle of the church. It had originally been published in a Mazatlán tourist newspaper. He pointed out details of the place, took them on a tour of the entire area and then back to the church, where he showed them a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe encased in, plastic and hanging on a wall where the altar used to be.

  They left twenty pesos with him and walked back toward the Bronco. Rounding a bend in the riverbed, they saw a man looking into the Bronco. The shooter went tight and into a half crouch, but Luz said it was only a curious farmer, and the tension eased. The farmer was embarrassed they’d caught him snooping, but Danny said, “Buenas tardes,” pleasantly, and the farmer seemed to feel a little better, waving and smiling as he drifted away.

  Coming back into Zapata, the shooter instructed Danny to park the Bronco out of sight in a shallow arroyo behind where they were staying. Danny didn’t ask why. They went to the cantina porch and sat there, evening drinks, evening talk.

  The village hombres were getting an early start on the main fiesta celebration scheduled to begin at nine o’clock, two hours away. A couple of pickups were parked on the east side of the plaza, hoods lined with empty beer cans and the hombres lounging around the trucks. Suddenly a police car came up the street and turned into the plaza area.

  “Stay put,” the shooter said, watching the car. “If we move they’ll notice it. Maybe they’re just here to keep an eye on the boy-os, hold things in check on fiesta night.”

  The black-and-white moved slowly around the plaza, past the pickups. One of the hombres held out a beer to the cop on the passenger side, but the cop laughed and waved him off.

  When they came around to where Danny, Luz, and the shooter were sitting, the car slowed and stopped.

  “Buenas tardes,” Danny said in his best holiday fashion, looking up at the late sun and guessing it was still tardes.

  The passenger-side cop said the same thing back and grinned. “Are you here for the fiesta?” he asked in surprisingly decent English.

  “Yes, it should be a good time.” Danny gestured toward Luz and the shooter. “My friend already has a pretty woman to dance with. Will anybody mind if I dance with the senoritas?”

  The cop laughed and looked hard at the shooter, looked at him in a pointed way, as if he were comparing a face he’d seen in a photograph to the one before him. He tried to be casual about it, but wasn’t very smooth, and it was noticeable.

  Then he grinned again and spoke to Danny, “Your amigo is indeed lucky to have such a pretty woman to dance with. “Yes, the señoritas will dance with you if you ask politely, and they will be pleased you asked. A word of warning, though: Plan to leave the fiesta around midnight. By that time there is much beer in the bellies that muddies the minds.” He flipped his head toward the hombres in back of him. “And it makes them reach for knives or beer bottles when they have an argument. If things get foolish, they surely will blame any problems on the gringos who were dancing with village women, and then you will have trouble.”

  “Muchas gracias,” Danny said. “We’ll be careful.”

  “Yes, be careful, amigo.” The cop looked at Luz María in her yellow dress. “That is a very pretty dress, seiiorita. Sefior, you are very lucky to have such a pretty woman in a pretty dress who cares about you.” The shooter grinned back, nodding vigorously.

  “We are engaged to be married,” Luz said without missing a beat, and tucked her arm in the shooter’s. Danny was starting to wonder about that very thing himself.

  The cops rolled down the street, talking with one another. Where the plaza ended, the driver looked back at them over his shoulder, then made a corner and headed out of the village toward the Durango road.

  “What do you think?” Danny asked the shooter.

  “Don’t know. Things are always what they are and never what they seem; there’s always a lot of smoke and swirl in these situations. We’ll go to the fiesta tonight, pull out in the morning. Maybe take the road to Ponuco we were on this afternoon and try to work our way north through the mountains. Is that possible?”

  “It might be possible if we strap on the supplementary gas cans and if you want to take about three years to get to the border.”

  “If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. We’ll consider that plan C. I’ll pay you extra, of course.”

  Danny wasn’t worried about money at the moment. He was worried about the forces of light roaming around the state of Sinaloa, like beaters movin
g through a forest. He was worried that the thin, hard face of Clayton Price might have been staring out of some photograph along the road in Concordia while cops passed it from hand to hand and committed it to memory before driving through the nearby villages on a festival day in 1993. Then he got to thinking the shooter had said “plan C.”

  “If that’s plan C, maybe you’d like to share plans A and B with me?”

  “Plan B is a straight run up the main roads, take our chances. I’m still thinking about plan A. I’ll let you know when I get it worked out.” He went inside and came back with a margarita for Luz and two beers for him and Danny.

  Luz poked Danny’s arm. “I washed your shirt, Danny. Pants, too, so you will look nice for the fiesta. I hang them in window to dry. Such two handsome hombres—the señoritas will be chasing both of you, and I will be jealous.”

  There was a curious lilt in her voice Danny had never heard before, something to do with getting a fix on things and knowing who you are and where you’re going. At least she was still doing the laundry.

  While Luz was up in the room getting herself ready, the shooter told Danny how he’d felt about hearing the rosary being said at twilight. It was the most thoughtful Danny had ever seen him.

  He suggested they visit a man named Ian who lived up the hill back of where they were staying. The shooter had reconnoitered the village on Saturday morning. Outside of a house he’d seen a sign proclaiming Ian Somebody lived within and had published a book called “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” Continued. The shooter said B. Traven’s original book was one of his favorites, the quintessential portrait of greed and treachery, but he’d never heard about any sequel and wanted to see what this guy Ian was up to. After a field trip in the afternoon, Danny was thinking, they were now into the archaeology of Sierra Madrean literature.