by Richard Ford
Bernhardt had the money ready. Six fifties in a Holiday Inn envelope. He reached carefully toward the desk, not quite leaving his seat, put the envelope on the scrolled edge, and slid it forward to within the deputy’s reach. “La petición,” he said softly.
The deputy contemplated Quinn curiously and turned his head as though he heard a sound in the air that he liked, something in the rain hiss. He picked up the envelope, opened the belly drawer, and laid it inside. He looked back at Quinn with interest. “Is your friend?” the deputy said, folding his hands back on the desk top.
“Right,” Quinn said. The deputy was an asshole, but that was a little luxury of taste he didn’t own at the moment. You went through who you went through.
The deputy began shaking his head. “Is bad,” he said and looked grave.
“What is?” Quinn said.
The deputy kept shaking his head. “Narco,” he whispered and let his eyes go dreamy.
“But in a world of bad things,” Bernhardt interrupted softly.
“Ahh,” the deputy said and smiled. It was a sound he liked making. It pleased him into submission. Bernhardt had made the same sound in the morning. “Do you like Oaxaca?” the deputy said derisively, his spidery hands still composed on the desk top. It was beginning to rain harder, and the light passing through the trees behind the deputy had become an exhausted yellow blur. Quinn was ready to get out. He heard Bernhardt shift his feet nervously.
“Sure. It’s great,” he said finally.
“Es bonita, no?” the deputy said and smiled. “Is pretty, yes?”
“It’s terrific,” Quinn said.
“But it is not the United States, correct?” The deputy continued smiling as if they both could agree on that.
“It’s got its moments,” Quinn said. He glanced at Bernhardt.
“Maybe you would stay longer,” the deputy said.
“I doubt that.”
“Of course,” the deputy said and nodded.
Steps approached the office door. A secretary, a Mexican girl in a tight skirt, brought the document directly to the desk. She placed it in front of the deputy without acknowledging anyone and left. A pen was in the deputy’s hand moving quickly.
When he had finished he folded the document carefully, placed it in a fresh white envelope, and pushed it across toward Bernhardt. He smiled again. It was a postal clerk’s smile, no special conviction. “Is dangerous,” the deputy said, looking at Quinn.
“What’s that?” Quinn said.
“Narco,” he whispered, musing in the shadows.
“I wouldn’t know about it,” Quinn said. He didn’t like the implication and he didn’t like the deputy too much. Bernhardt was already at the door.
The deputy leaned backward in his big chair and opened his arms widely as if his appeal went out to a higher authority. “I know about it very much,” he said and sighed, his chest heaving beneath his silk blouse. “It is a grave offense.”
“I’ll take your word,” Quinn said.
“But I envy that,” the deputy said loudly, letting his arms fall onto the sides of his chair. “You are lucky to know nothing. Maybe you will do well.” He kept the smile frozen on his tiny clerk’s face.
“I’m betting on it,” Quinn said and followed Bernhardt out.
In the courtyard a farmer in a straw hat stood beside a goat, sheltering below the arches of the palacio. A current of urine had drained from between the goat’s legs out into the court and become diluted in the pool of speckled water where the center drain of the court was clogged. The farmer was looking straight into the sky as if he could see the end of the rain high up and was waiting for the moment when that end would arrive where he was standing.
“Deats showed up,” Quinn said when they had stepped out to the cooler air of the mezzanine. It seemed believable to him now. Something about the deputy made it completely believable.
Bernhardt’s mouth was nervous. “Where?” he said. He reached in his coat pocket for the envelope.
“At the bungalow.” He watched Bernhardt closely for some sign of going down the road. “Something’s got to happen right now,” he said.
Bernhardt looked at him. “Do you want just to let it go? We can just let it go.”
“That’s not one of the options,” Quinn said. “Think of something else.”
Bernhardt stepped beside the granite balustrade that overlooked the court where the farmer waited, staring toward the sky. He put his fingers on the edge of the stone. “Does it matter to you if your brother-in-law did as Mr. Deats says he did, or that he didn’t?” Bernhardt said. “A moral dimension.”
“I’m not thinking about that right now. I’ll think about it later.” He didn’t like things that way, but they were that way. The moral dimension wasn’t an issue.
“These are necessary questions,” Bernhardt said.
“So what do you know about him?” Quinn said.
Bernhardt watched the farmer with the goat. “I know a man Mr. Deats has business with,” he said softly.
“And?”
Bernhardt seemed to want to be very precise. “To deal with Mr. Deats in any way may damage their business, and then we are in their business. And that becomes risky. Do you understand?”
“No,” Quinn said. “I just want to get Sonny out of the joint and the fuck out of here. Why is that risky?”
“I have to see the other people involved. I must impress Mr. Deats.” Bernhardt was keeping his eyes on the courtyard while he talked. “That’s the risk. It might be better to disengage.”
“Are you talking more money?” Quinn said.
“No,” Bernhardt said and suddenly looked at him significantly, though he couldn’t be sure what the significance attached to.
“What happens to Deats?” he said.
“I will talk to him,” Bernhardt said. He took off his glasses and held them up to the grey rain light that bathed the inside of the court.
“Is it easy?” Quinn said.
“No. It is not easy,” Bernhardt said, blinking in the cool air.
“Is it dangerous?”
“Maybe it is,” Bernhardt said.
“I don’t want my wife in this.” He tried to get Bernhardt’s eye. “Do you understand that?”
“It is not necessary,” he said. “She can go back. We do not need her.”
“We need the money, though, right?”
“Of course.”
“All right,” Quinn said. “I just don’t want her in any heavy-duty shit.”
Bernhardt fitted his glasses carefully back over his ears and looked at Quinn calmly. “I will want you to come with me tonight,” he said, “for business. I will explain to you.” He began to walk toward the stone steps.
Quinn looked in the court for the farmer with the goat. They had moved back under the arches. Bernhardt appeared suddenly in the court below. He stopped and looked up and took his glasses off again in the shelter of the lower arcade. Quinn felt something changing imperceptibly, something that didn’t make any difference. It was simply the less important thing you gave up, the slightest measure of control, he knew, that meant you wanted something very bad.
9
ON THE AIRPORT ROAD the rain was already past, dissipating into the mountains above the bungalow, the airport obscured out in dampness like a city eclipsed in a dream. The rented Dodge had a radio and Quinn let himself ease into the jabber of furniture sales and flights to Europe, good living south of the border. There had been police in the streets when he had left the palacio, too many for one afternoon. It had made the city feel tense, as if the rain had left a film of dread behind it. Ugliness went on at all hours, but you saw it by accident or not at all. Something had made waves in the public sector, and Bernhardt had mentioned the shooting the night before. Everything was ripples on ripples.
He had stopped at a tourist jeweler on the way and bought a silver lavaliere with a green inlay of a man dancing. The saleswoman was English and claimed the piece was jade an
d antigüedad and protective, but the inlay had been machined. It was one lie or another, and for that instant all that mattered was whether the woman had been convincing.
What had pushed it out of shape in L.A. had been the work. He had thought if he could manage a union card somewhere between San Diego and Santa Barbara and get on any place at scale, he could last a year, and something would get obvious in a year. They rented a house in the redneck suburbs back of Seal Beach a block from the navy station, and he had gone on weekends re-poing cars while he made the oil company offices all week and got his name on the master lists at Rockwell and McDonnell’s and little feeder plants in Ventura.
Rae read magazines for a month, then went to work out of boredom ushering in a Jerry Lewis cinema. She started waitressing in a Redondo bar, then quit and spent a month answering the phone at a crisis center in Point Fermin until the crises started coming home, making her lose sleep. At the end she quit and stayed home watching quiz shows and reading National Geographics stoned, until she decided the moral climate in California was oppressing. She told him she didn’t like the weather being the same and the air changing colors, and that when she was with Frank Oliver they had gone north of Seattle two winters and stayed, and he worked the local rodeos, hung out, and moved cars into B.C., and she applied at the Swinomish reservation and taught prenatal care to give herself a life, and that she had liked that a lot better than L.A. She said she had read in the L.A. Times that people with factory skills were getting hired in Washington and the unions were opening up and she had an idea about Alaska. She said they could both work on the pipe and live in a house free and save twenty thousand dollars in six months and do whatever appealed to Quinn after that. She said she wanted to do whatever he wanted to do and stay together, and if he wanted to leave that was all right.
L.A. had begun to feel flatted out and unlocatable. He started hitting the fights on Thursdays when Rae was ushering, and going to the little social club arenas in the East End where the pure Mexicans fought, and sometimes to the Lakers with Rae when Sonny could get tickets. The fights had a discipline to them and a palpable life behind them, a coherence that was correct and apparent. Though he seemed to spend all day waiting for the night, and that seemed backward from how he wanted it. He didn’t like re-po except it was the only weekend work, round the clock, where he could make enough to get by while he cruised Highway 1 with the phone book open, looking for job plants with a sign up for fitters, and waited up for calls. He began to spend every Friday afternoon on the bus to Lancaster or Mojave or Victorville, and every Friday night shadowing trailer courts and phone booths down the road from little four-room desert cracker boxes, wearing black jeans and a turtleneck, waiting for a sailor or a marine from Seal Beach to show up in his Firebird or his Formula Two and disappear inside. It was the wrong thing, but that was all there was he could stand. He could solve the routine and he needed the money. When the door closed, he would wait ten minutes watching, then walk to the car, check the back for kids or dogs, match the number off the windshield strip, slim-jimmy the door, cut the ignition, plug in the universal, and drive the car back across the desert to a big floodlit fenced compound in Downey where he could catch a ride to the Greyhound station on Main Street then start for another car.
On the last night he had walked up to a red Firebird—it had been a weekend of Firebirds—outside a one-row apartment motel in Oro Grande and slid inside without checking the back. When he started on the ignition a sailor with a chain dog leash grabbed him from the back seat and strangled him against the headrest until he lost consciousness. Two men drove him in handcuffs out to the desert between Yermo and Daggett, helped him out into the middle of the highway and started kicking him until he fell on his face, then kicked him in the ribs with tennis shoes until he went out again. The sailor had been waiting the whole time and the other one had been watching out the motel window. The last thing he remembered was the sailor asking, “What in the world do you want to do a thing like this for, man? It’s a hard one. What do you want to rip us off for, man, we’re Vets. Don’t you know that? We’re Vets.” And they started kicking again.
He had lain on the warm asphalt watching the Firebird’s red taillights being sucked up in the dark tunnel below the dazzle of L.A. sixty miles west, and he thought that the sailor had been on the money, and that if he’d been stupid enough to put in for it, the sailor had every reason to kick the shit out of him and leave him in the desert to freeze without any shoes. When he had gotten down off the plane from Guam, the very first thing he’d asked himself, standing on the tarmac at Pendleton, feeling lucky to be alive, was what had he won or how was he better. And at that moment he couldn’t think of anything, though he figured an answer should’ve come to mind, a wrong answer at least, but not nothing—which was what he got. But in the middle of the night in the Mojave, he knew he’d at least won one thing, the right not ever to have to look up again and see taillights out in the cold channel darkness, the right not to be alone and busted up in no place he knew, with no place close to go.
When he got back it was Sunday morning, and Rae was asleep in the bedroom with the shades drawn. He sat on the edge of the bed and taped his ribs, turned on the radio, and made a call to Ronny Bliss in Michigan, somebody he’d known in high school and the service, and that he didn’t care anything about, but who had told him once lying in the sun on China Beach that his old man worked for the state and could get him a job doing something at Natural Resources that wouldn’t be hard to take and that would pay enough to live. It felt stupid at that moment to be going where he knew things instead of where you could find something you didn’t know, as if unfamiliarity had a magic familiarity didn’t. But his ribs hurt, blood was dry in his ear, and it seemed like the only thing that pulled the world together into an efficient place and had sense in it, and something that had clear sense was what he needed. It wasn’t even the place as much as the sense the place made that mattered.
Late in the afternoon, Rae said Michigan wasn’t a place she ever thought about going. She walked through the rooms in the house in her underwear and a purple T-shirt, smoking a joint, with sleep in her face. She said it was the wrong direction. She asked him why he didn’t want to go to Seattle since it was closer and the weather was nicer and she could get a good job with the Swinomish or the Tulalips or anybody up the coast. He sat on the bed counting money. She had gotten him into this and he had made a commitment without knowing it, and she was something he thought he ought to try to do without. He hadn’t told her about his Morgan money and didn’t see any reason to. She hadn’t said if she was going, and if the money wasn’t in it, the break could just be clean. Otherwise he might find himself in a ditch some morning in the cold, without his shoes and his head singing the way it had this morning, and just figure the only thing for him to do was to crawl back out and go home and let somebody take care of him and tell him it’s all right. In a while his ribs would quit hurting and his head stop singing, and he’d forget it. And that scared him. Wanting consolation was in you all the time, and you could get sucked up like those red lights in the night, and disappear altogether.
Rae was in the kitchen with the light on where he couldn’t see her. He had $180 in cash and some checks.
“Don’t you know progress runs the other way?” she said irritably. “You’re just backing off.”
“Let’s just don’t do that,” he said. “I’ve been west enough.” He wanted to get out of the basin by six o’clock. She could make up her mind by herself. She was just riding again anyway.
“What are you going to do if I don’t go? she said. She had walked into the dark living room, her long hair around her face. He stuck the folded bills in his shirt pocket. He had his bags in the car already. “You just going to fuck whores like you like to?”
“And do dope,” he said. He could hear her breathing.
“You wouldn’t want to ride with Sonny down to T. J.?” she said.
“I’d rather re-po Plymouths
and get my face kicked again,” he said.
“I don’t understand what’s the matter with you,” Rae said. She stood in the door. “You act like everything turned against you. You want to get rid of me? ’Cause I can just disappear, if you do. You know that?” Her eyes were wide. “I’ll just disappear. You don’t have to go to Michigan or wherever in the hell it is out there.”
“You can go or stay,” he said. “I thought you liked that. I’m sorry I don’t have a big living room for you to ride in.” The room was dark, but the light from the bed lamp made her features severe.
“I’m afraid I’ll get off somewhere and you’ll make a place to live, and I won’t be able to, and it’ll make me miserable,” Rae said.
He walked in the kitchen, stood at the drainboard counting out cash on the rubber mat. “I’ll give you a hundred and twenty,” he said. “I need the rest of it.”
She stood in the bedroom door. “You shithead,” she said. “You don’t care what I’m afraid of. You just care what you’re afraid of, isn’t that right? That’s what conduct means, isn’t it?” She wasn’t crying yet.
“What do you want to do?” he said.
The dark behind her made her seem taller and frailer than she was. “Nothing’s permanent, right?” she said.
“Nothing yet,” he said. Light outside was the gun-metal color of first dark. He thought he could hear the ocean, but the ocean was too far away, though something always made him think he heard it.
“Do you love me?” she said. She had begun to cry. “You don’t like to say it, do you?” she said. “It scares you. You don’t want to need it.”
“I can take care of me,” he said.
“Then I don’t want to marry you,” she said angrily. “I don’t want to be tied to you if everything turns to shit out there. You understand?”
“That’s fine,” he said. “But if you want to go, you better come on.”
