"What's a bomba?"
"A bomb." He pushed down on the hood to check that it was latched, and grinned at her through the windshield. "Mexican slang for a junker."
"Junker? My car's not—" What was the point? She looked back at the crowd of men behind her car. They were grinning, watching. They didn't seem to be in any hurry, acting as if this were an amusing development to their day. Even the driver of the big tractor-trailer didn't act like a man on a schedule. She grinned and they all grinned back, every one of them. She would have had to be blind to miss the fact that she had seven pair of male eyes following every move she made.
Beside her, a wry voice said, "Mexican men are a pushover for a good-looking blonde señorita." She met his eyes and they weren't admiring. His words might have been complementary, but his voice was bored.
"But you're not?" She made it a question although he was not going to answer. "Are you a pushover for any woman?"
"No, so you're wasting your time." He grinned at her flash of irritation and said, "Let's get this show on the road, shall we?"
The driver of the van was back in his vehicle, impatiently watching the performance through his windshield. His horn blared, but no one paid any attention.
"It's just as well," said José as if he read her mind. He was a lot of things she actively disliked, but he had a voice that was deep and resonant, the voice of a man who should be doing something, taking charge of something.
"What's just as well?"
"The gringo." He jerked his head towards the van. "He's a prime candidate for angina. Overweight, out of shape. Smokes. I'll bet he has chest pains and won't stop eating red meat. If he joined in our little party he might just have a coronary while we're getting you up that hill." He turned quickly and walked towards the back of the car.
She could have sworn that something had flashed in his eyes just as he turned away from her, as if he wished his words unspoken. She didn't know what kind of a look it was, but she would remember it. She might paint that look, that face, because there was so much hidden behind the lazy image he projected. Of course, she wouldn't be able to do a real portrait, not without him sitting for her. It would be done from memory, impressions of José rather than actual photographic details. It could be a powerful picture, capturing the mysterious essence of this stranger against the desert mountains.
He seemed to have taken charge back there. Funny, because it had been the Mexicans talking, planning, and him leaning back and watching with an amused detachment. Then, when the action started, it was his voice calling out instructions that no one questioned. What was it that made seven husky Mexicans follow the instructions of a tattered foreigner who looked as if he hadn't a nickel to his name?
"OK!" he called to her. "Let's go. Put her in neutral and take the parking break off. We'll take it slow and easy, up and around that corner."
Very slow, she realized. There were eight of them, all muscular and tough except for the college boys who seemed to have the enthusiasm to make up for a possible lack of hard muscle tissue. But the car was big, heavy, and the slope of the hill was enough that she wasn't sure if they could really do it.
Slowly, it started moving. The right wheels crunched on gravel, then the front wheel regained the pavement.
"All right! Brake it!" It was José's voice, a bit breathless. She pushed hard on the brake, aware of the men behind and paranoid that the car would start rolling back, that someone would be crushed underneath and it would be her fault.
He led them all in a rhythm. Rest a few minutes, a bit of laughter and talking. Then the silence, the men in her rear view mirror getting into position. Then his shout and the brake released, the car rolling slowly uphill under their efforts. Then his voice would call out to her, the tension of his pushing making it strained, breathless. When the brake was on, he said the word that had them all relaxing again.
Then it would start again.
It took half an hour to move the car around the corner and up the slope to the place where it could be pushed off the road. Meanwhile, two more vehicles crowded into the traffic jam. Dinah wasn't sure how many Mexicans were pushing by the time it ended. She was pretty sure by that time that her car must be cool enough to start driving again, but she was waiting until her audience had gone away before she tried the engine. She pushed the lever into park and put on her emergency brake, then got out and smiled at them all except for José.
"Thank you. Gracias. Muchas gracias." It was almost all the Spanish she knew.
They smiled back and the college boy looked as if he was ready to ask her to marry him. José must be right. She'd never received such an enthusiastic reaction from a group of men before. It had to be that she was so blonde while they were so dark with their Latin handsomeness.
Dinah heard another flurry of Spanish conversation, then one of the Mexicans consulted José about something. The drifter shrugged and looked bored, then everyone started moving. The Mexican college student stopped in front of Dinah and stared at her with adoring eyes.
"You stay in Mexico long? I see you again?"
"Thank you for helping me." She smiled, but shook her head and said, "I'm not going to be here long, but thank you."
She thought he might have persisted, but one of the other boys shouted to him and he waved at her, then said on a note of awe, "Bye, girl," and left her smiling as he ran down the hill towards the Beetle.
The cars and trucks started moving, some north and some southbound. There had been so many people, but within a couple of minutes there was only the old Oldsmobile, and Dinah standing and staring after the red truck as it led away a procession that included the big tractor-trailer and the van and camper.
José wasn't in the red truck. He was here, on the road, walking towards her car with a pack slung over his shoulder. As she turned, taking him in, he rolled the pack off his shoulder, and it came to rest on the ground behind her trunk.
"Got keys for this trunk?"
She stared at him. "What—" The red truck was gone now, even the camper behind the van had disappeared. The mountains were empty, and dry, the water sucked out by the hot sun. "Why aren't you gone like the rest of them?"
He was so damn nonchalant, standing there pushing his hair back, then ignoring it when it flopped back down on his forehead. How could he stand there as if the sun were nothing to him when she could feel the moist tickle of perspiration running down between her breasts? "I'm not giving you a ride. I don't pick up hitchhikers."
"Bully for you." He walked past her to the front of the car and peered inside. "As for a ride, it'll be a bloody miracle if la bomba gives anyone a ride. You got any water?"
"Water?" She peered over his shoulder. "I don't need water. See the reservoir? There's lots."
"Dreamer." He turned away and walked to where he had put his pack. "I need a newspaper or a magazine." She frowned at him and he said impatiently, "A piece of cardboard will do. Surely you've got something like that in this junker?"
She was not going to react to his insults. He was the kind of man who probed and probed, hoping for a reaction. She was not giving it to him. She saw the trunk swing up and ran back. "Hey! What do you think you’re—"
"I asked you to open it." He reached over and touched her chin with a dirty finger. She jerked back from him, and snapped her mouth closed. He bent down into the trunk and said mildly, "Keys were in the ignition."
"I didn't say you could—" He didn't care. He was going to do what he wanted, ignoring her, smiling a bit if she complained about it. Short of picking up the tire iron and threatening him with it, she wasn't sure she could stop him.
When he grabbed one of her sketchpads from a cardboard box, she jerked forward. "Hey, what are you doing with that?"
"I’m going to open the rad. This can take the steam better than I can." He stood up and she got both hands on the pad.
"You can't use this." She gripped the pad tighter. "Not my sketch block. Cardboard, you said? Or newspaper?" She rummaged in the bo
x with one hand and pulled out a Sunday edition of the Vancouver Sun. She kept her other hand tight on the pad. "Will that do?"
He surrendered the pad and she pushed it back to safety in the box, then accused him, "You got dirt all over it. Your hands are filthy."
She wished she didn't feel like a gadfly, following him, making silly noises. He was back at the hood now, pressing on the radiator cap with the newspaper, treating the rad like an explosive danger although it had been cooling down for quite a while now.
He said absently, "My hands were clean until they started trying to push your car."
The car was dusty. She looked at her hands and they weren't very clean either. "José, do you actually know what you're doing, or are you just monkeying with my car for the joy of it?"
"I know what I'm doing. Stay back."
He leaned against the wad of newspaper. She heard a hiss as he pushed harder, then steam shot out on both sides. He stood very still, seemed to push hard against the newspaper for a long time, and she had a vision of his arms weakening and José's hard face becoming the brunt of a destructive blast of steam. She shuddered and hugged herself despite the heat.
"I thought so," he mumbled as he bent down. The radiator cap was off. He said, "You're almost out of water." Then he magically produced two gallon containers of water from behind the car.
"I can't be out of water." She followed him, then followed him back. Her blouse caught her attention and she rebuttoned it while he was bent over the radiator, slowly pouring water in. "Where did the water come from, José?"
"The tractor-trailer. The driver left it for us." She noted the ‘us’, frowned, but didn't comment. He added, "But we've only got the two gallons. Let's hope it's enough for your thirsty beast." He stopped pouring, watching heaven-knew-what in that little hole in the top of the rad. "Must have been overheating for a long time," he said finally. "You got antifreeze in?"
"Anti—It's not winter. Why would I need antifreeze?"
"Helps prevent it boiling. Must have boiled, pushing the water through into the overflow reservoir. Must have a small leak in your rad cap, prevents the water sucking back in, lets air in."
She was pretty good mechanically, but he was losing her. She almost asked him to explain, then stopped because it seemed like handing him a victory. "If you thought it was short of water, why didn't you say so before you got the rad open?"
He leaned back on his heels, the almost empty gallon bottle hanging from the fingers of one hand. He was grinning."I might have been wrong. I wouldn't want to stick my neck out and then be wrong."
She laughed. "Machismo?"
"Maybe," he agreed. "It's probably catching in this country. A man's got to keep his image up."
She pushed her hair back, felt the dampness from the heat. She'd be a wilted flower before the day was over. "I'll be glad to get the car started again, get the air conditioning on."
He frowned over her words and opened the second bottle. She wondered how much water that rad held. "José, do you really expect me to give you a ride?"
His eyes lifted from the radiator and met hers. She could not read anything in the gold-flecked blue as he said, "I'll pay my way looking after la bomba. I'm a fair mechanic."
She believed him, but he was a disturbing man. The idea of sitting inside her car alone with him, going all those miles with his overwhelmingly masculine presence, was more than she thought she could take. And what was he doing bumming around Mexico, hitching rides that went nowhere?
"José, why couldn't the red truck take you any further?"
"I was elected." He managed to pour half of the water into the little hole before it started to overflow. He lifted the jug away and she saw the ripple of his muscles through his thin cotton T-shirt. "If I didn't stay with you, some of the Mexicans would have, they weren't going to leave you alone out here. When I suggested it, they agreed that it made sense for me to stay, since I’m a Canadian, too."
She felt a jolt go through her, as if his coming from her country created an intimacy between them. She looked around, the empty desert, the hot sun. She licked her lips, missed half of what he was saying.
"What?"
"Start the engine. Once the water starts circulating, I'll top it up from this bottle."
She watched him through the window of the car, seeing bits of him around the hood. His hand. His shoulder. He stepped back and she saw all of him, and he was an impressive sight. He'd been perspiring and some of his hair was clinging to his face. His T-shirt was clinging, too, and any woman looking at him would have trouble avoiding a fantasy of him without the shirt ... without the jeans. She grinned and decided that if he were to light a cigarette now the cameras could roll and the resulting advertisement would get a lot of non-smokers to go back to the noxious weed.
The hood slammed shut. She stayed behind the wheel, watching him, feeling the unbearable heat of the sun through the glass of the car windshield. In the rear view mirror she could see him go back, disappear behind the open trunk. She felt the car shift as he moved something in the trunk. Then the trunk slammed down. A second later he was beside her in the passenger seat, slamming the door, and she was glad it was a big, wide car. He was a couple of feet away, but even so there was an overpowering intimacy when that door slammed shut.
Maybe it really had been him in that ad she'd seen, during that last camping trip. Sally had pulled the magazine out, then flushed when she had realized Dinah was watching. Sally was old enough that no one could tell her what to read, but that resentful look had been an attempt to lump Dinah in with the other adults who had made Sally's life hell.
"Are those guys really worth looking at?" Dinah had asked curiously, knowing she had to conceal her conservative desire to push the magazine into the fire.
"Some o' them." Sally had grinned and Dinah had found herself looking as Sally turned the pages.
"They look plastic," Dinah had said, and they did. To her it didn't seem sexy, the men posed with a look on their faces that said they knew they looked good. "Except him. That one looks sexy to me."
He'd had his clothes on, a work shirt and a leather jacket rumpled with hard use. He must have been working, his hair wild in the wind, and he'd stopped to light a cigarette. The camera had caught him in that instant and he'd looked up, his mouth closed around the cigarette with sensual firmness. He hadn't been the kind of man who took his clothes off for a camera, just for a woman, alone and with love. He'd been a man of action, stopped in the middle of working hard. The sexiness had more to do with what was in his eyes, and his face with the deep lines over the eyebrows, than with the perfection of his hard muscular body.
"Do you smoke?" Dinah jerked when she realized it was her voice asking that question. But he did look a lot like the man in the ad. Funny how that picture had affected her. Her life was too busy for fantasizing, but that night ...
"No." His voice was absent. He was examining the details of her dash, asking, "Where's the temperature indicator?"
"Right there. A light comes on and it says ‘hot’. Should I turn the engine off?" Her hand hovered at the key.
"Not yet. It's just a damned idiot light. Don't you have a temperature gauge?"
She shook her head.
"Oh, hell. OK, turn it off and we'll give it a few minutes before we start." He leaned his head back against the back of the seat, eyes closed. He looked as if he might be sleeping, dozing off, except that she could see the tension around his mouth. She decided that he was a man who didn't always have an easy time relaxing.
"Thanks, José." She found it wasn't hard to say. "I wouldn't have realized the rad was low on water." She still didn't understand why the overflow had water in it. Maybe she would get him to explain as they drove. The thought startled her, because she hadn't consciously decided to let him ride with her.
"It's Joe," he said, not opening his eyes. "It's just that the Mexicans are more comfortable with José." He rolled his head on the back of the seat, reached up and pushed his ha
ir back. "What about you?"
"What?"
"Your name, señorita."
"Oh. Dinah."
"How far are you going?"
"La Paz." Her fingers curled on the steering wheel. She felt as if they were waiting for something, or standing on the edge of a precipice. He was here in her car. He was a mystery, a man capable of a lot but apparently doing little, wandering around Mexico with a big pack. "What about you? Where are you going?"
"La Paz, too." He sat up, and said, "Let's see if the old car will do it, shall we? If all goes well, we might make Guerrero Negro tonight."
She started the car again. He was very still, listening, his eyes narrowed like the man in the ad. "Are you sure you never smoked?" she asked. "Did you ever work—"
Absently, he said, "I used to, years ago." She didn't know if he meant working or smoking. "OK," he said briskly. "It sounds OK. Let's roll, but take it slow on this hill. Let's not overwork her." The wheels crunched, the car bouncing a little as they rolled onto the pavement. "You could use new shocks."
Smoking, she decided, and asked, "Why did you quit smoking?"
"What's this? Twenty questions?" He reached for his seat belt and snapped it into place as she started the car rolling up the hill. "I once saw an autopsy done on an old man who died of lung cancer. Hey, don't turn on the air conditioner!"
Her hand jerked back from the control. "Why not? It's roasting in here!"
An autopsy? He must mean on film, a documentary. She started to reach back for the control that would send cool air into the cabin of the car.
"Don't use the air conditioning when we're going uphill. She'll overheat for sure if you do that."
With all the windows open, Dinah felt as if she were being buffeted around the car. She narrowed her eyes, hoping no dust would blow in and turn her contact lenses into instruments of torture. As they drove, Joe twisted around and adjusted the windows until they had a good airflow without quite so much violence. He told her to keep the car in low gear going up the hill. "It'll stay cooler."
So Much for Dreams Page 3
