The Ultimate Good Luck

by Richard Ford

  Time seemed to speed up then, and he felt the need for cover. He thought he had at the most a minute, and then there would be no more chances.

  Rae’s lips were pressed tightly against her teeth, and she seemed heavy and in danger of falling down. She hadn’t spoken, and he turned her toward Absalo in the direction the campesino had run, and where there were no sounds in the street and no motion up the flat façades. He couldn’t make himself think of Bernhardt, though he thought a lot would come to him later and that everything was changed beyond retrieval. Below them, the Centro lay in a smear of lights and trees, and beyond that above the buildings he could see the blue Corona Cerveza globe shining on the still night. Anyone who saw them now, he thought, would know where they came from, and it would be over.

  “Don’t run,” he said. He reached back in the car, got his pistol, held Rae under the arm and shoved her. He took a last look at Bernhardt. He was small on the office floor. His glasses were on his face, but his shoes were off him as if he’d been blown completely out of them. The telephone was replaced in the cradle, and the wall behind where he had stood was unmarked. The campesino had hit him with every round he fired and only stopped when there wasn’t enough left to shoot at. It was skilled work, something Bernhardt wouldn’t have expected.

  Far up Cinco de Mayo there were headlights. They startled him because they were coming against the traffic, and at a speed only the police would come.

  They reached the corner of Absalo, and Rae continued walking out into the intersection. Her eyes were fixed and wide and she made an attempt to pull him.

  “Just do what I tell you,” he said, and jerked her backward. She looked at him, her eyes beginning to move a little, but her mouth still against her teeth. He thought for an instant she was going to speak, but then saw that she couldn’t and that it was not speaking that kept her on her feet. He looked back at Bernhardt’s office—the Mercedes, the doorway bleeding light, the gun alone on the pavement, and the casings still rolling down the gutter—and he was almost for an instant overcome with a giddy thought-erasing fear that he was going to die and it would be the wrong time for it.

  The Avenue Absalo was dark, though there were regular stanchions lighting each corner block after block. The street was a comercial with pink and pale blue adobe façades. A sweet bakery smell floated in the street, and Quinn scanned the storefronts but nothing was unfamiliar and there were no alleys or cars parked, and no one was visible down the street except a man at the first corner in the oval of pale light, smoking.

  Rae was walking stiffly and beginning not to breathe right, and she suddenly groaned in her chest. The man in the light looked at her but didn’t move except to transfer his cigarette from his hand to his mouth. Quinn heard the liquid murmur of tires on bricks behind him, but he didn’t want to look back. He stuck his pistol in his pants pocket, and held Rae more tightly.

  As they approached under the light, the man looked over his shoulder, and Quinn saw he was the man who had shot Bernhardt. His features were the ones he had watched down the street a long way. The man’s hair was across his forehead, and the poncho was gone and he was barefoot. When they came near him, the man turned and raised his hand and touched the brim of a hat he wasn’t wearing and bowed slightly at the waist. He whispered something softly, the sound of a bee caught in a glass. The man was not out of his teens, and Quinn had the impulse to shoot him in the neck once and pay Bernhardt off for not bolting. The car coming against the traffic drifted noiselessly past the intersection. Quinn looked but it was not a police van, and then they were past the man at the light, looking onto the Avenue Juárez, which was masked and anonymous all the way down the hill toward the vapor lights in the Centro.

  When they had walked ten meters, close to the store windows, Rae began to shake and then stopped walking. Her breathing became deep and quickened, and she sucked her tongue and pushed her head to the side as if she was going to be sick. He held her and pressed her shoulders against the window glass, and put his face close to hers for a long time, trying to join her breathing to his breathing, and calm her, staring through the cheap pane into an empty barbershop, at the chair and the white walls and the mirrors where he could see his reflection. And then by degrees he heard the soft suspiring night sigh of the city begin again, and Rae became erect and cool in his arms, and he could smell her breath hot and not sweet, and for a moment, with her close to him, his cheek on the cold glass, he felt himself fully located for once, and in a world in which time couldn’t pass.

  22

  THEY WAITED INSIDE the shooting arcade behind the Juárez Market. Teenagers were packed in, playing the games, drinking the mescal, and yelling. There was the anxious smell of pomade and the shabby, mesmerizing drowse of small chances being taken. Quinn stood at a machine on which a tall smiling Negress in a red sari undressed as points went up, until only her red underpants were left and then they were gone and a cat’s face smiled in her crotch and lights flashed PUSSY, and the girl’s expression changed to an embarrassed O. He kept playing it until he couldn’t lose.

  Rae sat on the wooden bench against the wall. Soldiers wandered in and stood in the door, lingering a moment considering her, then walked back outside.

  At midnight Quinn came and sat beside her. The popping, clanging of the shooting games was loud and submerging, and he tried just for a moment to hold things in place. Luck was infatuated with efficiency. But he couldn’t work that trick now. He thought about driving into St. Louis, headed overseas, about the slow uneventful evening’s ease of time out of Illinois and verging on the realization of being nowhere at all that mattered. He took a room downtown and walked up Olive Street to where the sun was pink and gold, and the old brick warehouses relaxed in a deep, slumbrous shadow. He remembered perfectly buying a cigar and two quarts of beer in a paper sack and walking down in the dusk to see the Cards, all so that he could not think for a time about going to Vietnam. A pressure seemed released and an inevitability forged, and he thought about the day with longing. And his mind now seemed to want that and nothing else.

  “I’m over my head,” Rae said, staring at the violet and yellow machines. Her voice was steady. She touched his hand with cold fingers.

  “Let it go,” he said. “You’re flying out of here tomorrow.”

  She seemed not to hear. “Do you know that man who killed him?”

  “No,” Quinn said.

  “Do you know who Carlos was calling?”

  “I wouldn’t guess.”

  She seemed removed from talk as if she was already gone. “Do we have any chances left?”

  He stared at the Negress in her sari, waiting to be undressed. He wanted to play it again. “We’re not even in it,” he said.

  “Can’t you see Zago?”

  “I can’t think about him right now.”

  “If you aren’t leaving …” she said and arranged her hands in her lap. “You used to say I made you feel lucky. Is that all gone now too?”

  “I thought this was what I had to do to have you back.”

  “That’s silly,” Rae said. “It just seemed convenient.”

  He looked down the dark row of shooting games at the Mexican boys pouring money in. He reached in his pocket and felt his pistol. One of the children began banging on his machine and cursing in Spanish. The other players stopped and stared at him until he broke the glass on the machine. They all seemed fixed and detached in a pleasing way that made him want to stay in the gallery a long time.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Rae said. “It reminds me of the dogs too much.”

  There were no more taxis, and the buses had quit at midnight. He led Rae up the Twentieth of November Street through the vegetable stands behind the market toward the zócalo. The street-lamps were off and a foreign blue light misted the air, stars pale and bristling above the alley openings. It made his mind clear. The Christmas lights were still lit in the zócalo, but the cafés in the Portal were shut and the metal tables stacked inside. He w
alked her across the empty park with his arm around her shoulders. The Baskin-Robbins had been boarded and the soldiers patrolling the Centro were inattentive or asleep on their feet.

  The dining tables he had seen from Bernhardt’s car were still lined across the hotel atrium. The clerk stood behind the high desk listening to a radio and rolling dice with himself. He looked at them as though he’d seen them before but didn’t care. Quinn said in Spanish that there was a room and he wanted it. The clerk’s look became drowsy, and he fingered a file in a drawer, then pulled a card. He studied the card awhile, as if he was trying to find what was wrong with it, then he smiled at Rae and laid the card on the desk top.

  “No hay matrimoniales,” he said proudly.

  “What’s that mean?” Rae said.

  “No double beds.” Quinn signed and gave the card back, waiting for the key.

  “He thinks I’m a whore,” she said and smiled at the clerk. “It must be these heels.”

  “It’s a boring job,” Quinn said, and put the key in his pocket.

  The room was hot and full of flies and smelled like old laundry. Rae opened the window and stood for a moment looking without talking, as though she saw something in the distance over the low prospect of town that reassured her. Quinn pulled the transom, put his gun in the bureau drawer, and sat on the one wooden chair and watched the flies being soothed past Rae into the open night. In a while she took off her dress and lay on the bed beside the window in her white bra and underpants and the necklace he’d given her, and shut her eyes. Quinn turned on the bathroom light and checked the shower for scorpions, but there weren’t any. He thought about the money up in the bungalow, but there was nothing he could do. It would keep there unless someone tore down the house. He washed his hands and walked back in the room.

  Rae had begun to breathe steadily, her hair wide and deep red against the white covers.

  He sat in the chair and watched her. He hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, and hadn’t had a pill in twelve. He was stronger than he thought he’d be and straight-headed. He watched Rae breathe until he heard steps in the hall approaching the room. Someone coughed, a man’s voice, then keys jingled. He heard a lock fall, then the steps grew farther away and a door closed. He thought about Bernhardt, with every bullet in him as though he had danced to catch them all. He wondered if Cinco de Mayo was blocked off with trucks flashing lights, and soldiers sealing off the sidewalks. He imagined separate faces, Zago and Deats, but they seemed to lose ground irretrievably and be replaced by a vista over pale grey water, at the perimeter of which tiny dots didn’t move, like boats too far out to picture. Bernhardt’s absence made him feel marooned close to the clean, satisfied edge of exhausted possibility, beyond affection or sorrow, the stalemate edge of all losses, the point where time froze on whatever was present, and nothing could be longed for or feared or protected against, where luck was not the thing you played. It was the best luck there was. He might’ve liked Bernhardt, he thought, if he’d known him somewhere else. He had liked Bernhardt not always telling the truth, and not lying, and not leaving when he could’ve left. But that was it. He’d see Sonny one more time because he still had the responsibility to console. But he didn’t love Sonny. And sometime in the afternoon he’d get on the plane with Rae, then that would be all that mattered anymore, an intimacy that didn’t need an outside frame.

  Rae stirred in the bed. Her legs parted and she moved on her side. Time seemed to expand around him and expectancy subsided. He sat beside her on the bed and listened to her breathe and watched her as though she was the only thing he could see. He put his cheek on her side and felt the firm hits of her life. Her flesh seized, and he knew she was cold, and he lay beside her in his clothes and put his arms around her and held her to try to make her warm.

  23

  AT TEN HE WALKED across the Centro to the agency on Hidalgo Street. He had Rae’s ticket validated and bought his own. The ticket was for nine in the morning. It gave him time to see Sonny and do what there was, and then get out. The connection went into New Orleans.

  He walked back across the zócalo to where Rae was waiting at the taxi queue. He didn’t want her at the bungalow now, but he didn’t want her in the hotel either.

  She stood in the fresh sunlight, looking up at the miradors circling the Centro as if they were a serious problem she didn’t understand. She had on new blue sunglasses. “I know what’s wrong here, Harry,” she said.

  “All of it’s wrong,” he said. He motioned for a cab. He wanted off the street. There were more tourists in town, and female students walking to the technological college in pairs. Things were resolving back to everyday enterprise. The Baskin-Robbins was still cordoned. The sky was wan and bluish, and the Christmas lights had been turned off, but the nearness to normal gave everything a delicacy that felt dangerous.

  “There’s just too much here that’s uninteresting,” she said, still studying the façades. “It isn’t like Europe, I don’t know why Sonny ever came here.”

  “He came to smuggle cocaine,” Quinn said, pulling the cab door open. “I doubt if he had time for the sights.”

  “I guess that’s right, isn’t it?” she said and got inside.

  The cab passed up the Avenue Guerrero along the arts palacio. The side streets were crowded with tourists, and police vans were parked at the palacio gate, officers standing in the street waving machine guns. They were after stolen paintings, and Quinn put his window up. He wanted to get the money without an incident, then have what was left of the day to see Sonny and try to get a word to Zago. That was the only way he could plan it, and the money was crucial. He figured Deats worked for Zago creating dilemmas, since without Deats nothing changed in substance, but with him everything seemed desperate. But he didn’t have to think about Deats anymore. Deats either had his troubles with Zago or he was off the case.

  The cab turned up Manuel Ocampo three blocks off the zócalo, and there were soldiers massing. They were deployed on opposite sides of the street in the shadows, looking grey-faced and fidgeting. They had flak vests and riot visors, and had their weapons at sling-arms. Sergeants stood along the curb edges yelling into the lines and counting heads. The soldiers all wore new white canvas puttees below their GIs, and bright orange epaulettes. They were soldiers from somewhere else, with no qualms about shooting locals, since their own families couldn’t be reached. And they were being hidden for a reason, something that would pop up suddenly, and where the usual anonymity wouldn’t be enough.

  The cab driver glanced at the soldiers. “Aéreos,” he said and drove past cautiously. Rae fingered the window edge, gazing at the muster.

  “What does that mean?” she said.

  The only people he could see who were not soldiers were children hawking limes to the sergeants farther up the street. “Airborne,” Quinn said.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Maneuvers.” He kept his eyes on the direction the cab was going.

  She took her glasses off and looked at him, her eyes white-lidded as though she had scrubbed them to get a stain off the skin. “I counted two hundred. That isn’t good, is it?”

  “Not our business,” Quinn said.

  She smiled. “We’re different, right? Like Carlos said.” She sat back around. “Hands to work. Hearts to God.”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “I have a theory, you know.” She was staring at the street. The cab had a painted tableau across the top border of its windshield, a long green pasture with a gold mountain in the distance and a black-haired girl with big tits in a bathing suit, standing at the edge of a lake smiling back into the cab. It gave the driver something to look at, and Rae stared past it as if she couldn’t see it. “Women who marry older men are always grim,” she said. “It’s formulaic.”

  “You must have somebody in mind,” Quinn said, watching the street.

  “Zago’s wife,” Rae said.

  “She’s just another cunt, right?”

  “
She’s worse,” Rae said. “She’s got busted luck all over her. You can smell it.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Quinn said.

  “You’re just not a woman,” she said.

  The cab passed a park where there was an oratory statue of Juárez wearing a concrete frock coat and a friar’s hat. Something different from the deputy of penitentiaries’ portrait. Juárez’s devotees had littered the base with tall purple flowers, and there were two blue policemen standing beside a lone catalpa smoking and guarding the flowers. Beyond the park the houses were neat, pink and green mansionettes in arranged shady rows. All the likeness of Juárez made him be somebody else, somebody he wasn’t, and Quinn thought that was his final good. He assumed nothing and risked everything, and when he was dead you could make him whatever you liked.

  “Passion and melancholy get mixed up,” Rae said, still musing about Zago’s wife. “It’s just a long funeral.”

  “Is that all your theory?” He was thinking about the bungalow, about getting into and out of it fast.

  “That’s why you’re the way you are, Harry,” she said and smiled at him.

  “Fucked up, right?” he said. It annoyed him to get figured out, and figured wrong.

  “You think you’re always losing something,” she said, “and you think you like to be alone, as if it made you powerful, but neither of those is true. That’s all. I worry what would happen to you if I got killed.”

  “So do I,” he said. “But that’s so you won’t have to.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “It makes me feel better. It ups the ante.” She looked out at the genteel street. The cab had crossed the American Highway and started slowly up into the Reforma, where the houses were situated behind clean walls with citrus trees blooming over the tops. House servants were on the sidewalks pushing strollers.