by Richard Ford
The man made him feel like something was trying to get inside of him, something he didn’t want, like a regret, but that regret was only the advance party for.
“I was wondering why the streets all changed names in the middle of town,” Rae said cheerfully.
“Too many heroes,” he said, “not enough streets.”
“That must be a big problem in underdeveloped nations,” she said. She put her arms around his shoulders and held him tightly. He felt the same thick ether of regret rising in him. “You can’t let fellow Americans bother you,” she said in a friendly way. “They’re just in love, and they don’t know how to express it. Isn’t that what you believe?”
“Sure. Whatever.”
“You liked those shorts too, didn’t you?” Rae tilted her face back into the warm sunlight and closed her eyes. “Tight pussy,” she said dreamily. “It’s very stylish now in Moline or Carbondale, or wherever they’re from. Maybe Charlevoix.”
“I didn’t last very long up there,” he said.
She smiled into the sunlight. “You’re a great kidder,” she said. “You can’t be serious a minute. It makes it all seem worthwhile.”
“Just your bad luck,” he said. “You might’ve hooked up with a comedian like your brother and had it all your way.”
The day had begun to hot up. Second-class buses wallowed in through the streets, windows full of mute Indian faces. Diesel had begun to overpower the sweet cinnamon smell filtering out of the mercado. All the fountains were on.
He watched the Americans emerge onto the Avenue Independencia from the Portal, and into the sun toward the Baskin-Robbins where the grate had just been pulled open and a boy was mopping in the unlit inside. The Americans stopped below a chiropractor’s neon sign made to look like a spine, all the vertebrae curved and articulated, and bracketed to the chiropractor’s windowsill above the Avenue Independencia. They stood beside the Baskin-Robbins, and the girl was staring up while her father pointed out the sign, sweeping his big arm up and down to explain the shape. His wife was gazing out across the street and imagining, Quinn thought, that the day was heading downhill. There was a brown dog standing beside her looking where she was looking. Her husband turned and spoke to her. Quinn could see consolation on the man’s wide face. “I think knowing too much just makes you miserable,” Rae said, for no reason, and at that moment the Baskin-Robbins exploded.
And for a moment you could see nothing, and then you could see everything.
There was one great bulb of orange flame roaring outward and bursting apart in the air, and then a huge hot noise, and then the air suddenly was emptied of sound and filled with a baked greenish dust. It seemed, for a moment, as if a meteor had hit the building. A bright green taxi that had been in front of the Baskin-Robbins was blown away from the curb and into the street, and the air seemed for a moment to be the color of the taxi reduced to dust. The Baskin-Robbins, Quinn could glimpse through the panes of rising dust, looked like a garbage can emptied and kicked on its side. Whatever was inside was blown outside now or gone altogether. The chiropractor’s sign was missing. There were rag figures strewn on the sidewalk and in the street, but nothing was moving or flailing. Men began rushing off the adjoining street into the space of the explosion as though they were drawn in by the suck of air. Loud whistles were beginning. Tourists were running out of the zócalo in all directions. A woman screamed a long beseeching scream, and then a lot of people started yelling and the noise and swarming commotion took over.
Quinn was on his feet going toward the Americans or toward where they had been a moment before, but weren’t now. Outside the park shade the sun was suddenly much hotter and brighter, and he could smell rank-burned metal and cordite. It was familiar and became almost pleasant when the air overheated.
A siren began somewhere out of the Centro, and he stopped and looked at Rae, who was still at the bench, standing on it, her hands over her ears as though she could still hear an explosion. She had her glasses on and her face was unrevealing. He started back toward her through the mix-up of sprinting Mexicans chattering and searching all directions at once for a new peril. He was too used to being alone. His instincts were adjusted to that, but it was witless to leave her. Rae suddenly raised her hand and flung it forward, her face as calm as when she had turned it toward the sun. She thought there was no danger and he should do whatever he had begun to do. He stared at her a moment in the sunlight, then turned back to where the explosion had been.
Out in the street he saw the American girl’s pink hot pants. They weren’t on her now but were wadded into the muffling system of the taxi that had been blown over. He couldn’t see the girl, though he saw her father, twenty meters down Independencia lying in a clutter with his white T-shirt blown off his shoulders and his skin blacked and starting to bleed. There was more screaming as more became visible in the street. The siren noise became more intense and nearer. Soldiers were coming from all directions, running with their M-16s ready at their shoulders, approaching heavy-footed and knee-bent as though they were receiving fire from somewhere, their mouths closed and drawn back, ready to shoot somebody.
He felt himself suddenly lose breath. His legs became awkward and painful, and he knew it was the way you felt just before you got shot, ultimate vulnerability. He thought about his gun, about the precise location of it in the bungalow, and the good it would do him to have it right now. None.
He knelt beside the American on the sidewalk and discovered his daughter was under him, odd-shaped and missing most of the part of her where her shorts had been. Her father was making a big blood bubble out of his mouth. They were both dead. He stood up and looked quickly for the wife, tried to find her white blouse in the rubble, but couldn’t see her. The dog was sitting alone in the opening where the Baskin-Robbins had been. The woman could’ve been sheltered, he thought, but he didn’t see how. Articles of clothing and peelings off the ice-cream machines were blown out into the street as though the explosion had curved as it went outward, throwing as much down-street as directly across toward the park. It made everything the same.
People were yelling in Spanish now very fast and loud, something he couldn’t understand, that sounded like “I own her.” He walked back into an area of sidewalk that was suddenly deserted, and he felt all at once that he was conspicuous and shouldn’t be here and shouldn’t let himself be separable at all. There was a theory for that too. Trucks were approaching. He could hear them straining gears. The sidewalk began vibrating. He posed an unreasonable risk now. On the front of the chiropractor’s building was the long red and black boxing poster he had seen all week and that had not been touched. It showed two giant black boxers with their fists clenched in fight postures above the words “Sin Empate, Sin Indulto.” No Holds Barred.
Soldiers had begun forcing people away from the Baskin-Robbins, pushing some unselectively, face-first into the wall of the chiropractor’s building using their gun barrels, and kicking them in the hamstrings and yelling. The soldiers thought the bomber was on the scene and they were going to catch him, and Quinn knew if he didn’t walk off the open sidewalk at that moment they would see him and take that occasion to arrest him. Firemen had begun covering the taxi with AFF foam, getting it on everything including the soldiers, who began kicking the people against the wall harder and pushing more people into line. The rag figures were covered, and he realized now he couldn’t tell the woman from the mop boy if he found her. The commotion was maddening and all around, and he walked out into the Avenue Independencia and into the park through the crowd at the curb, away from where the soldiers were yelling and kicking people in the back.
Rae was alone on the bench, the zócalo having emptied. The cab drivers and shine boys had all run out across Hidalgo, leaving their cabs and their chairs warming in the sun. They stood inside the shadows of the Portal with the tourists, whispering and gesturing toward the uproar. Rae sat facing the Baskin-Robbins, which was, except for two circus bubbles hung high on the bu
ilding’s façade, completely flocked in foam.
Quinn sat down without speaking and stared at the plaza. And for a moment, sitting in the sunlight beside Rae in the consoling wake of violence, he felt insulated from trouble, almost drowsy in the warmth of the afternoon. A monotony anyone could get inside of, anyone could feel safe in.
“Didn’t you see me waving?” Rae said, her voice cheerful, though not looking at him. “I stood up on the bench and waved at you. I thought you saw me. You looked like you did.”
“I saw you fine,” he said. He let the drowsiness come down on him.
“Then you’re just a stupid fuck, aren’t you?” she said, her voice not steady now. She looked at him, her face wild. “It’s the oldest trick they know. Set a bomb and three minutes later set another one, and you get the police and all the other stupid assholes.” She shook her head. Her hair was damp. “You’re fucked up. You’re just fucked up. Didn’t they teach you anything in the marines?”
“They lit that girl up,” he said. Sirens were very near and more police whistles echoed through the empty park. There was a sudden, sharp pocking noise, close in, very fast, an M-16 going off at full, the familiar, unreverberating plastic noise, like a fire-cracker going off underwater. It wasn’t a bothersome sound.
Rae stamped her foot on the pavement. “What happens to me?” She looked away from him fiercely. “You tell me, all right? What in the hell happens to me if you get blown up?”
He stared in the direction of the automatic weapons fire. It came from toward the Reforma. The soldiers had somebody trapped and were free-firing in on top of them. It began to be intense. “There’s no way in hell those people could’ve expected that,” he said.
Rae stared at him strangely. “What’s the matter with you?” she said, unable to keep her head still.
“Not anything,” he said. He felt tense now and his legs trembled. It wasn’t a bad sign to tremble, it meant you were alert, and you needed to move. “I didn’t see it right, that’s all,” he said.
A green and white ambulance truck turned onto the Avenue Hidalgo and idled along the perimeter of the park. The driver pointed to them for someone in the back of the truck, who suddenly peered out through the window. A two-way radio crackled inside, and the man in the window said something to the driver and the truck speeded up.
“Everything’s gone so bad,” Rae said. She was squeezing her hands in her lap. “I really can’t do this.”
“Yes you can,” he said. “You certainly can. Let’s get up.” He heard more pocking sounds—thick, padded noises from streets much nearer. Something in the nearness alerted the soldiers in front of the Baskin-Robbins, and they began running toward the noise, their legs webbed with foam, their helmets and canteens bouncing, crouched in anticipation of shooting. The people against the wall began to stray away unhurriedly. It made him feel safe not to be interesting to soldiers or ambulance drivers. “Just stand up,” he said. He stood and felt lightheaded.
“There’s no place to go,” Rae said helplessly.
“Yes there is, so just get up. It’s fine.” Water beat loudly in the fountains and the thop-thop of a helicopter somewhere too high in the haze to see began buffeting the ground. People in the Portal were staring at the sky.
“This is stupid,” Rae said. “This is all very stupid.” She was starting to cry.
“No it’s not,” he said. “It all makes perfect sense.” He looked around the empty park. A green parrot stood out on the hot pavement perfectly still, its red target eye blinking at the sunlight. He took Rae’s hand.
17
ALL THE COMMERCIAL STREETS up Cinco de Mayo had emptied. No one cared to be on the street with soldiers, and the siesta had begun. Every two minutes a blue minibus would swarm by with its flasher spinning, and disappear into the Colonia La Paz, where shooting was still going, leaving the streets back toward the Centro silent and restricted. Whatever had made Quinn quease up yesterday had begun to stroke again, and he was having to down pills to keep his stomach from involuting. He didn’t want that trouble and he thought he could worry about the long-term later.
He had found a driver and paid him to take Rae to Monte Albán for an hour, then chauffeur her back to the bungalow via the periférico. She had gone quietly into the cab, but when he closed the door she rolled the window down and said: “Why don’t we just forget this now? I don’t care anymore.” Her hair had come loose and her skin looked dry and pale.
“You should’ve figured that out before,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m very sorry.” The cab slipped away and out of sight into the mercado.
He wanted the gun. The thought of the American with his clothes burned off made him feel a way he hadn’t felt in a long time, a way the dead boy out in the shanties and the American girl blown in two hadn’t made him feel—that he could shoot somebody. Nobody wanted to shoot anybody until they saw someone they knew killed ridiculously. And then it became the only way to preserve importance and you couldn’t back out. Shooting somebody raised your personal importance level, and that was necessary now. He knew he could work right up to it.
Bernhardt’s office was on a hill block of blue and white flush façades with fake miradors above street level. The buildings were flat-roofed comerciales with steel shutters that opened directly to the sidewalk.
Beside the office door a carne carbón built out of half a five-gallon Pennzoil can sat smoking with strips of meat burning on the grate. A rooster stood beside the brazier and watched him approach. The rooster flapped its wings when he got close, as though it wanted to fly but had forgotten how. Quinn checked down the street for the tender. Two women were walking leisurely in his direction arm in arm, but too far away. The rooster had one leg tethered to a large rock against the wall, and after a moment stopped flapping and walked behind the brazier and stood looking up, noodling as if the silence had caused it to want to doze.
Bernhardt’s office was a high-ceilinged room open to the street. A desk in the corner faced out and a few gloomy tube-steel-and-plastic clients’ chairs backed against the wall barbershop style. The room was dim, though there was a zizzing fluorescent ring. Quinn disliked the office. It felt tired. Bernhardt told him no one trusted lawyers who were hopeful, and no one paid lawyers who were rich. Everything in the States was the opposite and better.
Bernhardt had his coat off, his silver pistol lay on the desk top in front of him. His hand wasn’t far from it, but he didn’t seem nervous. “Where is your wife?” he said.
Quinn looked around the room. “She gets upset when people get blown up,” he said. His eyes came to the gun. “Do you need that in here?”
Bernhardt smiled. He leaned his head a fraction toward the wall behind and opened his hands. “Ladrinos steal the paintings from the Palacio de Bellas Artes to hold for ransom.” He made a wry face. “The bomb is diversion. But violence is promiscuous.”
“What about Deats?” Quinn said.
“Arrangements are made now for Señor Deats.” Bernhardt’s eyes stayed fixed on him as if he was watching for a particular effect. “You are necessary now,” he said.
“How’s that?” Quinn said.
“To speak to someone,” Bernhardt said, his eyes intent. Bernhardt picked up a silver letter opener from his glass desk top and held the point to the palm of his hand. The blade distorted the light back on his face. “Señor Deats has associates in Oaxaca who are unhappy with him,” he said methodically. “Today I know this. They think he has treated them unfairly.”
“Are they going to kill him?” Quinn said.
“No,” Bernhardt said and shook his head slowly. “It will be painless.”
“What happens?”
“It is my worry,” Bernhardt said soothingly. “He creates his luck. Maybe it won’t be bad.”
“What are his friends mad at him for?”
“Business,” Bernhardt said. “I am not involved.” He closed his fist around the blade of the dagger and let his eye
s fall toward it. “Don’t worry about that.”
Quinn thought about the Americans at the airport full of bullets. It wasn’t how he had imagined things. And he had to let what he’d imagined slip away now. Bernhardt was lying, but he might not be lying about anything that mattered. It was just negative information, and he didn’t have the luxury for that now. “I have to think about it,” he said.
“Tonight.” Bernhardt pointed the dagger toward the open street. “It must be tonight.” A police van passed, flasher turning, but with no siren. Quinn could hear the engine strain up the hill. “If there is martial law,” Bernhardt said thoughtfully, “no one will come out of the prisión. So.” He let his head roll back against the cushion of the chair and waited. The smell of burned meat hung in the office. It was a rotten smell and infected the air in the room. “What did you think you would have to do to get your brother out of the prisión?” Bernhardt said and pursed his lips. Bernhardt reminded him of the deputy of penitentiaries, a certain distance, a certain reservation now. He wondered what Bernhardt’s was in behalf of.
