The Ultimate Good Luck

by Richard Ford

  Bernhardt said he had a judge ready in two nights to execute a document of release for ten thousand dollars, and Rae was bringing cash on Mexicana in the afternoon. Bernhardt wanted to know nothing about money until the moment he needed it, and today they were simply making the drive as though nothing was going down, to let Sonny know he was leaving. If the human flow changed or if an insider got down in his Super Plenamins and smokes, word moved that a release was coming and everybody lined up for a handout. But if the release went off fast only the alcaide had to be paid, and that was it. It was going to be necessary to purchase the official document of release in the afternoon, and then get Rae, which was what Quinn was waiting for and the only stake he figured he had in anything.

  Ahead, the army had arranged a new checkpoint on both sides of the road, with two sandbagged M-60s and plenty of help. Bernhardt stopped back of the barricade, showed his driver’s license and his prisión card, and was passed through. The soldier looked at Quinn through the window but didn’t check.

  Beyond the barricade on the opposite shoulder a line of second-class buses waited in the dust to be inspected, swagged to the side with passengers going to market day tomorrow, bundles and baskets piled on top and all the greasy windows filled with attentionless Zapotec faces, staring out at the highway. The soldiers were making everyone in the first bus stand out and haul their belongings off the top-carry and open them. More soldiers watched from under the plank hut while the searchers cruised through the Indian passengers, pointing at bundles and yelling to make the women raise their dresses while the men stood awkwardly with their arms up. Quinn thought about Rae having to raise her skirt for soldiers. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. In the waiting buses people were dropping fruit peels out the windows, and as the car eased down the line a pig’s face peered out a window all alone.

  “Pistols and explosivos,” Bernhardt said very professionally. He steered casually along the row of buses without watching the searches. “Storms come, and birds can’t fly to the sea, you know?” He smiled.

  Quinn stared at the pig’s impudent face. “Do they find any?”

  “No,” Bernhardt said confidently. “But they arrest for appearances. In United States, people respect money. But in Mexico, only soldiers. Tuesday you see nothing here. Last night an interception and today there are soldiers. Things could become difficult.”

  “I’ll just count on you to stay clear of those difficulties.”

  “I hope it is possible,” Bernhardt said.

  Back in the line a red Dodge van was waiting for inspection. It had good tires and a gold university door seal. Inside were three rows of American college girls all talking at once and looking out the dusty windows at the front of the line. The driver was a Mexican tired of putting up with horseshit. He wasn’t going to get fucked, and he wanted out of the sun. Quinn watched the girls go by. He wondered which ones would have to pull down their jeans for the soldiers and what they would tell whoever was paying for the trip. It was going to be an adventure.

  “It can quickly become a time for responsible laws now,” Bernhardt said and shook his head gravely. Bernhardt had big square incisors that were always moist. But he didn’t show them now. “Mordida is a source of irritation,” he said. “Like guerrillas. You do not have guerrillas in the United States. You are lucky.”

  “We live right, I guess,” Quinn said, watching the valleyscape open like a fan.

  “Perhaps one day. American cities invite it,” Bernhardt said significantly.

  “I’m in the here and now,” Quinn said. “I can’t worry about that.”

  Bernhardt looked at him seriously. “But you are in this now, Mr. Quinn. So you should know it intimately.” Bernhardt glanced at the mirror and at the highway narrowing into the desert. Bernhardt liked heavy-duty comparisons, and he wasn’t stupid about it, but some just didn’t hold your attention as well as others. Bernhardt could make you impatient. “A man wants to give his wife a life so pleasing nothing in it wouldn’t remind her of him. You see.” Bernhardt looked at him seriously. “Is that not right?”

  “It beats me.” It was the orthodox lie Mexican men told themselves to make themselves feel like gods on earth. It was shabby, but everybody believed it.

  “It is true,” Bernhardt said firmly and drew a breath. “But the guerrillas are like a man whose wife fucks everybody but him and there’s nothing he can do. He never pleases. He is never pleased. So he robs banks, shoots soldiers, blows up, sells narco, disparages everything. And everyone is displeased. And if your wife’s brother traffics narco then he is like a guerrilla, an irritation, and people do not want to do a favor for him.” Bernhardt turned and watched the highway glide by with satisfaction.

  “Love’s a hardship, right?” Quinn said.

  Bernhardt looked at him as if they understood one another perfectly. “Exactly,” he said, pleased. “It smells always of extinction.”

  “It’s a sweet smell, though, isn’t it?” Quinn said.

  “Ahh,” Bernhardt said, and smiled to show his incisors. “It is a sweet smell. There’s nothing like it. But it is extinction just the same.”

  In a different setup, he thought he might’ve found a way to like Bernhardt, only the setup didn’t include that now. Intimacy just made things hard to see, and he wanted things kept highly visible at all times.

  Animas Trujano centered on a low dry spot of highway with the big state prisión segregated above it by a long sandstone fault that gave the town the appearance of having been toppled off a more necessary layer of the earth. The village was a randy collection of tan and aquamarine thatch huts built along a mud alley that retailed whores and mescal to the prison, and a Zapotec herb market built under a long twig awning where the Indians bought Sidra and traded peyote buttons. Plenty of times he had seen moms and dads from Illinois standing out in the dirt alleys in their clean pastel suits and summer dresses, holding care parcels in both arms while the whores taunted them from the doorways of the little one-room chozas. Sometimes one of the smiling moms waved as if she saw something she recognized in his wide American face. But mostly they just stared up the highway in amazement as their cab left, as if they had been dropped backward into the worst dream they’d ever dreamed. Both his parents were dead, and thinking about the people lost on the streets of Animas Trujano made his situation seem worse, and he wanted to keep his spirits up, and the way to do that was not to see yourself as anything but yourself.

  The prisión was a rhomboid made out of yellow sandstone behind a tall chain fence. There were metal guard turrets and gimbal lights at each corner and guards were conspicuous behind the windows and on the walls. From the highway approaching Animas Trujano you could see a high, red safe-box building inside with long low buildings connected like spokes. On top of the safe-box was a transmitter tower with a red slogan light, and beside it a copter pad slash-marked H. It was the most single-minded piece of construction he had ever seen, and from outside it was inconceivable that men were in it and that more men got put in it every day. It would refute something basic in you, Quinn thought, to be put inside. And so of course there wouldn’t be any extremes beyond consideration to getting yourself out.

  In Animas Trujano the whores weren’t up yet. Portieres hung over their entries, though the doors to the mescalerías had been opened and green candles were already twitching inside. There were no moms and dads today and the town seemed inert and passed over. A Zapotec boy riding a bicycle flocked with wads of white cotton rode up the street against the direction of the car, followed by a dog, and there was a group of men standing beside an old green Impala that had crapped out in the middle of the street. Their heads were under the hood, and one pair of legs sprouted out into the strong sunlight. The boy seemed to be riding away from them.

  “Mexican men either work on their cars or piss,” Quinn said as the Chevy came up.

  Bernhardt didn’t answer. He took a black pistol from under his jacket and put it in a space beneath the dash.
Bernhardt had on a beige Italian suit, something, Quinn thought, you’d have to go a long way for. It made its own statement. “Maybe you should carry a gun,” Bernhardt said. The boy on the bicycle waved as he pedaled past. “If you smell extinction,” Bernhardt said appraisingly, “it maybe comes closer to you.”

  “I can’t smell it,” Quinn said.

  “But you do.” Bernhardt looked at him. “You are alone, that is detestable. Your wife is making you nervous now. So it scares you somehow, maybe.”

  “Not me,” he said and looked at Bernhardt. “I was in the war. I don’t get scared anymore. It’s my big problem.”

  “Then you are lucky,” Bernhardt said. He made the turn toward the prisión. He was silent for a moment. “Too many things scare me anymore. Too many things are to be afraid of.”

  “You’re all loaded up though,” Quinn said, pointing toward the gun. “Just stay between me and them.”

  “You may need to be close, though, before we’re finished.” Bernhardt attended the road carefully as it approached the fenced perimeter of the prison. There were soldiers and army police standing in groups on the inside of the fence and a brand new APC in front of the main gate with another sixty caliber podded on a truck bed. The soldiers stared at the car casually as if it made an uninteresting noise they had nothing better to do than identify.

  “Just lay it all out for me so I can see it,” Quinn said. He felt aggressive all at once. The prison made him alert, and that was the way he wanted to stay, alert to everything. “I like to be able to see everything when I do it.”

  “Maybe it will all please you,” Bernhardt said.

  Quinn glanced out at the yellow stone wall of the prison. It was long enough that at any one location you had no sense of there being an end to it. “I’d like to be pleased,” he said. “It would be a real fucking experience.”

  3

  IN VIETNAM Quinn had made a minor science of light-study. Light made all the difference in the way you performed and how you made out, since everything was a matter of seeing and not seeing. The right distribution of eastern grey and composite green on the surface of an empty paddy and a line of coconut palms could give you a loop, and for a special celestial moment you wouldn’t be there at all, but be out of it, in an evening’s haze of beach on Lake Michigan with teals like flecks of grey space skittering down the flyway toward Indiana, and the entire day would back up sweetly against a heavy wash of night air. And you could put it away then, ease your eyes, and wander outside another moment and join the world before the landscape began to function again as a war zone.

  Mexicans all had faith that rooms needed lights, though they didn’t have a systematic canon for where they went. Preference was for a single flo-ring bracketed midceiling, giving off just enough radiance to taint the air with an ugly graininess that seemed to hold bad smells, but wasn’t quite good enough to see by. The effect in all cases was of no light, though there was always the illusion of light that made you look too hard at everything, and at the end of any day made your eyes smart and water from wanting to see better than you could ever see. It made you feel dirty in a way that wouldn’t clean. It made all the daylight prospects seem jeopardized.

  The visiting room had a poor light. The space was a long cafeteria, twenty-five by forty, inside one of the low pavilions chained to the administración safe-box. There had been a row of high casements down the long walls, but they had been bricked and florings installed. Quinn thought it might have been usable once, but it gave you a sharp retinal pressure that made you unsure moment to moment if you could distinguish correct figure from absolute ground. And he liked to be surer than that.

  They had to wait for Sonny. The cafeteria was cool and quiet. There were patches of seepage on the concrete and armies of moyote beetles crawling out of the wall cracks, heading for the seepage so they could get in it and get on their backs and drown. The air had the thick sweet smell of burned cinnamon, and there were two brown-uniformed guards at either end with long rifles, watching an American prisoner whispering intensely to a woman across one of the long tables. He hated the room. It smelled like piss-stink Michigan grade-school cafeterias that made you gutsick and think life was shitty. The room was full of flies, though they didn’t seem to bother Bernhardt. He was captured by the woman the American prisoner was talking to.

  Sonny was let in the yellow metal door at the end of the cafeteria. The guard halted him, put his rifle against the wall, and patted Sonny down while Sonny stared into the room and smiled, his long fingers sensing the new air.

  Sonny had been good hoops. He was six three and soft-palmed and ball smart, and at a distance he didn’t look like somebody muling Baranquilla cocaine through Mexico into San Diego. He had once scored 100 points in a high-school game in New Rochelle, which was a state record, and when Quinn showed up a month ago, he looked like he could still do it, though he didn’t look that good anymore. He had gone to J.C. and quit to play pro, then gotten waived and wound up playing in Sweden for two hundred dollars a game. He had come back in a year with a Benzedrine problem and a Swedish wife and begun playing I. leagues in L.A. and got into the business of delivering animal tranquilizers to the dog tracks in Tijuana for fixed rates. He was just starting to move lorazepam when Quinn had moved with Rae to Seal Beach two years ago, and even then muling didn’t seem like a job you’d retire from. Sonny had floating, graceful arms and pale eyes that faked his moves and a way of walking toes-in that made you think he wouldn’t go anyplace very fast, which was wrong. He had dropped thirty pounds in a month, his complexion had grown speed bumps, his eyes had gotten wide, and he had begun to tie his hair in a ponytail. He looked to Quinn like a freak, somebody you wouldn’t stop for on the on-ramp.

  Sonny smiled as he sat down. “Fucking flies, man. Carry you off.”

  Quinn looked down at the guards. “We’re set now,” he said in a whisper.

  Sonny looked at Bernhardt and back as if he hadn’t heard something correctly. His eyes narrowed alertly. Quinn shoved across the paper sack with Sonny’s Allowable Personals—toothpaste, Super Plenamins, Lomotils, and a week-old copy of the Houston Chronicle. The guard who had passed Sonny in was staring at the paper sack, as if he thought it might contain something wrong. “Make this look right, please,” Quinn said. “People are watching.”

  “When?” Sonny said softly. He looked inside the sack and made noise with it. His pupils were too dilated. They looked like fresh fish eyes, but his face was still controlled.

  “Two days, three days,” Quinn said. It irritated him to have Sonny show up loaded. “It’d help if you’d stay straight for just a fucking day or so.”

  Sonny rearranged himself on his stool and squared his shoulders. He laced his large hands on the table and bent forward. “Sure,” he said and blinked rapidly. “No problem there.” He looked at Bernhardt and then alertly back at Quinn and smiled. This was killed-time starting now, and Quinn wanted out, but it was too fast. Short visits meant special things to the guards. “Where’s Rae?” Sonny said.

  “In the air. She’ll be here.”

  “You two gonna patch your act up?” Sonny said and tried to extend the smile into a leer.

  He wanted to stay cool. He wanted it right so Sonny could get out. But he didn’t want to take shit. “That’s none of your business,” he said.

  Sonny blinked again and forced his hands together as though he was trying to hold himself in on the center of something imaginary. The muscles in his arms kept seizing and relaxing. He was freaked, but that was his own problem. “I’m just a little wiped, you know? I did some crystal.” He grinned and looked up at both of them apologetically. “It’s like a strain, you know, in here.”

  “You bet,” Quinn said.

  The first time he met Sonny, Sonny was playing I. leagues in San Bernardino against some black noncoms from Victorville. Sonny was twenty-six and had some moves left. He was controlled and knew where the ball was when he didn’t have it. Quinn had driven out after a d
ay hunting fitter’s work up the Catalina Channel. Rae was answering crisis phone calls and he was ready to get out of the basin and into something less weird. Sonny’s team folded halfway and he let it slide in the last quarter, and when the game was over they drove in Sonny’s yellow Cadillac back to San Pedro to a Japanese restaurant where Sonny knew people. At the table Sonny drank a beer and relaxed and studied his hands as if they were instruments he admired but couldn’t quite figure out. “I could do that, you know, every day, twice a day. You know what I mean?” He looked up at Quinn confidently in the glassy bar-darkness. He turned his hand over, palm up. “But then where do I make a buck, you know?” His eyebrows twitched and he smiled. Quinn rubbed the beer glass around in his hands. He’d been digging up fitter’s work and he hadn’t thought anything about where Sonny was going to make a buck. “Sports is for kids, you know how that goes? Kids and niggers.” He bit at his lip. “Sweden, I could dex up, shave six to make spread, and waltz out loaded. But that’s not sports, Harry.” He looked up. “That’s business. I might as well be in the fucking record business. I’m getting old in this sports shit.” He looked innocent, as if he were the first human to apply the truth of the world to his own private case. In a week he was trunking lorazepam to Tijuana, and Quinn didn’t see much of him anymore, and in two months he and Rae had split east.

  Down the room, the other American, a skinny boy with a clean T-shirt that read “Try God,” was mumbling to the woman who had sunk down on her stool, letting the boy work her under the table with his foot. It seemed to interest Bernhardt.