Calendar Girls

by April Hill

  “I thought you told me that Cinco de Mayo’s not a big deal, here,” she remarked sullenly.

  “Not as big as some places, but it’s big enough for Benicio to make a few extra pesos. A lot of pesos, actually. And with the new baby, he can use the money. I’m sorry. Maybe I can find you another driver.”

  “Will another driver provide all the lovely extra service you do?” she asked sweetly.

  He leaned across to kiss her. “Could be, but there’s sure to be an extra charge for that kind of service. I’ve been working off the clock since I met you.”

  But Carrie had her heart set on being in the city of Puebla for Cinco de Mayo, and maybe driving on to Diego Rivera’s birthplace in Guanajuato. She had several days left before her flight back to L.A., and Ned was still on vacation. That was plenty of time to explore— and get to know one another even better, of course.

  “What if I just rent a car and drive myself?” she suggested. “I’ll leave right after you go to work tonight, find us a nice room in Puebla, and you can meet me there.”

  Ned shook his head. “Too dangerous. The main highway’s usually safe enough, during the day, but if you get lost, or have car trouble…a woman alone is still a target on some of these roads, especially after dark. There’s plenty you can do here in town, and after I turn in the cab, we can…”

  Carrie scowled. “But, I want to see…”

  “No.” And then, he grinned. “And before you ask again, the answer it still no.”

  “Is that supposed to be some kind of order?” Carrie demanded.

  Ned made a face. “Sorry. You’re absolutely right. I didn’t mean that to sound like…”

  “Like a petty dictator?” she asked smugly. “Emperor Maximilian, maybe?”

  “Funny you should bring up Max, like that,” he remarked, smiling. “One of the things that seemed to really piss him off is when the little woman went ahead and did something dangerous, after he’d warned her not to do it. One day—or so the story goes—Max was entertaining some sort of French dignitary, and Carlota came back from shopping. Apparently without thinking about it first, she confessed that she’d been roaming around the city without her bodyguards. Even with the French bigwig in the room, Max was so infuriated that he took her into the next room and spanked her so hard with a wooden ruler that the cracking noise sounded like gunfire. A couple of servants rushed in to see what was wrong, and with Carlota wailing at the top of her lungs, the French dignitary jumped to the conclusion that an assassination was in progress. He flew into the room with his sword at the ready, and found the Empress bent over the arm of a settee, with her petticoats over her head, her lace pantalettes around her ankles, and in his words—her ‘lovely derriere aflame with color.’”

  Sensing an implied threat in the improbable tale of the Empress Carlota being spanked to tears within earshot of a visiting dignitary, Carrie would have liked to end the discussion without further comment. But once again, her curiosity overcame her good sense.

  “You’ve been making this up,” Carrie said coolly. “All of it.” She looked at him closely. “Haven’t you?”

  Ned stood up and walked to the door, ready to leave for work. He dropped the book on the table. “No rented cars,” he said firmly.

  * * *

  In an effort to minimize the possibility of a breakdown on the road, Carrie called the most expensive automobile rental agency she could find in the Mexico City phone book, and arranged for a car to take the short trip to Puebla. Then, gritting her teeth at the added expense, she took the manager’s sage advice and upgraded from a twelve year old, dented Ford to a two-year old Mercedes—also dented, but white. The Mercedes was the safest, best-engineered vehicle in the world, the smiling manager assured her, and should she be forced by unforeseen circumstances to drive after dark, a white vehicle would be easily visible to oncoming traffic.

  She packed enough for three days, and left an airy little note for Ned at the front desk.

  Dear Tour Guide,

  On my way to Puebla. See you there, sometime tomorrow? Hotel Salazar, room 204. Sorry you’ll miss the parade, but I’ll take lots of pictures! Please don’t be mad that I didn’t take your advice, or should I say, obey your orders???? I promise I’ll make it up to you, and apologize in some VERY imaginative ways.

  Signed, Your Most Devoted and Appreciative Customer.

  Carrie finally got started out of the city at around five in the afternoon, a bit later than she’d planned, but with several hours of daylight still ahead of her. No problem.

  An hour and ten minutes later, she was stuck in a traffic jam that defied human description, with car horns bleating and drivers cursing one another, enmeshed together in what looked like fifteen unmarked lanes going in different directions. The drive caused Carrie to remember an article she’d once read about Mexico City traffic. The two phrases most often used by the writer were “utter mayhem,” and “raving lunatics.”

  The only good thing about being stuck in traffic, she learned, was the army of street vendors that seemed to appear from nowhere, offering their amazing assortment of wares to their captive audience—the line of cars that was crawling along at something less than snail’s pace. Carrie, who made an effort to collect at least one distinctive and high quality item of pottery wherever she traveled, was delighted, since she believed that anything purchased from its actual creator was vastly superior in workmanship and originality to what could be found in even the best stores. At several points, she stopped and exited the Mercedes long enough to do a bit of bargaining for something she liked. When the frustrated drivers behind her began honking their horns, she hastily selected a large pot exquisitely decorated with exotic birds. The price was far higher than she would normally pay, but as she tossed her very much thinner wallet into the big, ugly purse, she was convinced that she’d found a minor masterpiece by a major, as-yet undiscovered genius.

  Finally, with the expensive pot carefully positioned in the front passenger seat, Carrie left Mexico City behind her. In the snarl of city traffic, though, she had become confused about which turnoff she needed to take to get to Puebla. Some miles later, when she came to an unmarked intersection on an unmarked highway that appeared to be headed vaguely south, she pulled off the road onto the narrow shoulder and took a few minutes to reorient herself. As a beginning, she located the GPS unit (under her seat) and plugged it into the little round hole where she assumed it was supposed to go. (Like many other artistically inclined people, Carrie disliked and didn’t completely understand the majority of electronic devices.) The first hint of impending disaster came when the little green light on the GPS didn’t. Light up, that is.

  So, Carrie tapped the screen. Then shook it. Then shook it again, a bit more vigorously than she meant to. When she had finished shaking it, the GPS unit still didn’t work—and when she looked up, the sun was already beginning to set.

  Finally, after she smacked the back of the GPS unit hard enough to bruise her hand, and bounced it up and down on the passenger seat a couple of times, the little green light appeared. With trembling fingers, Carrie typed in the full address of her destination in the city of Puelba—and waited. And waited a little longer.

  According to the guy at the car rental place, Puebla was an easy two and a half hour drive from Mexico City, on good roads. When the GPS unit, (for which she was paying an extra twenty-four dollars a day) came on, it insisted that she wasn’t in Mexico, at all. She was somewhere near Boise, Idaho, on her way to Walmart.

  When whacking the GPS on the dashboard didn’t change its tiny electronic mind about where they were, Carrie checked the glove compartment, in hopes of finding a map. No map, but a pair of lime-green thong panties and a pint bottle of Tequila—disappointingly empty.

  The sun was definitely going down. The battery in Carrie’s gold-tone, nineteen-dollar Timex had been dead for a week, but the clock on the Mercedes’ dusty control panel said it was one-seventeen in the afternoon. Determined not to panic, Carr
ie checked the location of the sun, and tried to extrapolate the approximate direction she would need to go in order to get to Puebla. Southwest, maybe? Feeling better about things now that she had a plan, she started the car, and headed into the setting sun.

  Six miles later, traveling along another unmarked dirt road that didn’t seem to be headed anywhere in particular, Carrie noticed smoke pouring from under the hood of the rented Mercedes, so she pulled off the road, again. When six plastic bottles of purified water didn’t fix the problem, she began to wish she’d listened to Ned.

  Within fifteen minutes after she stopped the car, it was totally dark. Fifteen minutes after that, with Carrie on the verge of panic, a single headlight appeared in her rear view mirror, and she almost cried with relief. Help had arrived.

  Unfortunately, the headlight didn’t belong to a well-equipped tow truck from the Automobile Club of Mexico. It was attached to a rattling 1986 Chevrolet with no doors and four mismatched fenders. The tattooed guy in the driver’s seat was big and ugly, and he was missing a lot of teeth, but he seemed pleased to see her.

  Carrie was in the process of handing over her gigantic bag to the tattooed guy—at gunpoint—when she became aware of yet another set of headlights approaching at high speed. Seconds afterward, and in a cloud of dust, the unidentified third car skidded to a stop behind the car with the mismatched fenders, and when she looked closer, Carrie realized that the third car to arrive was a Mexico City taxicab. And then, to her surprise (and relief) her very own handsome tour guide leapt from the driver’s seat of the Mexico City taxicab and hurled himself at the big, ugly tattooed guy.

  After that, there was a lot of shouting and a lot of blows exchanged, most of them by Ned, who wasn’t as heavy as the tattooed guy, but a lot taller and in better shape, which apparently persuaded the tattooed guy to jump into Carrie’s rented Mercedes and take off down the dirt road with Carrie’s big, ugly purse. And her luggage. And—with the exception of her wallet, which she always kept in her pocket—pretty much else everything she owned.

  Carrie threw up her hands and began screaming. Not at the fleeing car-thief, but at her rescuer, who was just standing there, rubbing his jaw and feeling inside his mouth for missing teeth at the same time.

  “What in the name of God are you doing here?” she shrieked.

  “You’re welcome,” Ned remarked dryly. “Glad I could be of help.”

  “Help? You call that helping me? The jerk just stole my freaking car! My rented freaking car! Do you have any idea what something like that is going to do to my insurance rates?”

  Ned stopped rubbing his jaw and stared at her for a long moment. “That’s what you’re worried about?” he demanded. “Your damned insurance? What possessed you to rent a car like that, anyway? You may as well have been driving a goddamned Lamborghini with a sign saying steal me. You never, but never rent an expensive car out here, let alone drive around in it on these deserted roads at night. If I hadn’t gotten off early, and come by your hotel…”

  “I wanted to be in Puebla in the morning,” Carrie said sullenly. “And if I hadn’t gotten just a little bit lost trying to get out of the city, I would have made it, too. Well before it got dark. I didn’t need your help,” she added petulantly. “That man and I were about to reach an agreement.”

  “An agreement,” Ned repeated, shaking his head in what might have been absolute disgust.

  “Yes, and if you’d taken the time to understand the situation before beating the shit out of a person you’ve never even seen before, you’d know that all he wanted was money.”

  “That may be all he got,” Ned said grimly, touching his jaw once more, to see if it was broken, “but it’s sure as hell not all he wanted.”

  “Well, we’ll never know, now, will we?” Carrie hissed. “For your information, he and I were about to come to an understanding, before you barged in and started punching him in the face, that is.”

  “You were about to bargain yourself into a shallow grave,” Ned growled. “Not right away, of course, but after he’d had himself a couple of hours of fun. I’m sure it gets pretty boring, just sitting out here in the dark, waiting for the next idiot to come along—the kind of idiot who doesn’t have enough sense not to be on this stretch of road alone. I’ve been driving around for hours, looking for a white Mercedes. How the hell did you manage to get this far off the main road, anyway? The manager at the rental place told me he gave you a brand new GPS unit, and showed you how to use it.”

  Carrie decided to ignore Ned’s inquiries about the road, and about the GPS. It seemed much too complicated to explain just now. But that didn’t mean she was finished arguing her point. “The point is,” she declared smugly, “that if that guy had wanted to harm me, he could have done it right away.”

  Ned gave a short, bitter laugh. “Where’s the fun in that? When you can tie your victims to a cactus, or drag them behind a truck for a few miles, until they’re ready to give up the pin numbers to their damned ATM cards?”

  “You’re obviously not a very good judge of character,” she said coolly. Carrie’s confidence in what she was saying had begun to get a little shaky, but she was hoping Ned hadn’t noticed. “Anyway, since you’re already here, if you’ll just take me back to the city—to one of those ATMs, I’ll pay you twenty bucks more than whatever the meter says. Until then, I’d appreciate it very much if you’d mind your own business.”

  Ned responded by taking Carrie’s elbow, turning her around, and giving her rear end several very hard swats. She was still trying to object when he pointed to the cab. “Get in the damned car. I’d like to be gone when your new friend comes back with a couple of his buddies.”

  Carrie tried touching her rear end, and winced. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” she shot back. “Not after that! Just leave me alone. I’ll hitch a ride back to the city if I have to.”

  “You just can’t be that stupid,” he growled. “Not after what almost happened to you.”

  “I keep telling you,” she shouted, “nothing happened! I just lost a few…” Suddenly, Carrie stopped yelling, and patted the deep pocket of her skirt. “Shit!”

  “What’s the matter, now?” Ned asked irritably.

  “My wallet!” she wailed. “I threw it in my purse after I bought that freaking pot.” She pointed to the large, elaborately painted clay pot. The tattooed guy had apparently not found the undiscovered masterpiece, for which Carrie had paid ninety-five dollars, worth taking and had tossed it out the window of the Mercedes as he drove away.

  “Nice pot,” Ned said. “Obviously made in China, but nice. So, you’re broke, and I’m guessing your luggage was in the Mercedes with your new friend?”

  Carrie kicked the side of the dented Mexico City taxicab as hard as she could, leaving another dent.

  What happened after she kicked the cab happened very quickly, but even months later, Carrie found that she could remember every moment of it, in excellent detail.

  First, Ned pushed her down across the still warm hood, tossed her skirt over her head, and yanked her panties down to her knees, a posture that seemed vaguely familiar to Carrie. She knew what was coming, of course, and since she also knew there wasn’t much she could do about it, short of kicking and screaming, she did both of those things as vigorously and as noisily as she could. When Ned’s strong right hand began landing with a series of loud cracks on her chilled behind, she shrieked, kicked even harder, and unleashed a stream of obscenities in his direction. Her protest accomplished nothing, though, and turned to howls of pain almost immediately. Within moments, Carrie was in tears, and begging him to stop spanking. Which he didn’t. Not for what seemed to Carrie, and to Carrie’s scalded, throbbing behind, like a very, very long time.

  * * *

  The ancient fan in the cab wasn’t strong enough to reach the stuffy rear seat, so Carrie rode back to Mexico City in the front passenger seat, with one leg tucked strategically under her overheated buttocks. The road was rutted and pock
ed with potholes, which would have made the trip uncomfortable under the best of circumstances. With both cheeks of her rear end inflamed and sore to the touch, it was miserable. Even perching on one hip didn’t help each time the ramshackle cab hit another bump. She arrived back at her hotel with a cramp in her left leg, her right leg asleep, and her butt still on fire. The desk clerk greeted her with a smile, and her hotel bill—a bill Carrie had no way of paying.

  Ned pulled his wallet from his hip pocket, paid the current bill and one additional night, and escorted her up to her room.

  “I’ll find a bank first thing in the morning,” she said at the door, in as cold a tone as she could manage. “Without ID, it may take a while, but I’ll leave what I owe you at the front desk.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, I’m going back to Los Angeles, on the first flight I can get out of here.”

  * * *

  The following morning, Carrie called her credit card company to report her Visa stolen, and learned that her card had been maxed out overnight. With a queasy sensation in her stomach, she walked a few blocks to a branch of one of Mexico City’s largest banks, explained her situation, and asked the manager to contact her bank in Los Angeles—after looking up the phone number, which she had either forgotten, or never knew to begin with.

  Like many other artistically inclined people, you see, Carrie had always had trouble keeping track of numbers and passwords and other such superfluous and irritating information. Which was why she didn’t know the phone number of her bank, and why she had printed (in very small letters, and in an extremely obscure place on the back of her ATM card) her pin number.

  Carrie’s checking account showed a current balance of four cents. With six assorted checks and her rent check outstanding, and one hundred and seventy five dollars in returned check fees already posted, she was overdrawn by two thousand eighty-four dollars and thirty-eight cents. All of which, she was politely assured, would take “just a few days,” or “perhaps a week or two” to correct. At no cost to her, of course—once her claims of being robbed were proven valid.