“What the fuck’s goin on?” Shelby demanded.
Abel said, “He say we see Soltero een one more hours at club by pasaje on other side of Revolutión. He say we see Soltero there.”
“Hope it’s better than this joint. One hour?”
“Ees okay. There good theengs to buy down below avenue. Many many shops down there. We go now and look at leather jacket. We stop dreenking tequila.”
Shelby said, “Know somethin, dude, when we git our money tonight, I might jist reach over and snatch that Soltero’s ponytail right off his skinny little head, that’s what I might do.”
Abel watched in dismay as the ox gulped the last tequila and reached inside his boot for his stash of meth. Abel Durazo was getting a very bad feeling and wanted to get outside pronto.
This time Nell and Bobbie were ready for them when they came out of the bar. Abel walked, Shelby weaved.
“He’s amped,” Nell said to Bobbie.
She and Bobbie were standing next to a donkey cart. The sad-eyed animal was painted black-and-white like a zebra, and gringo tourists wearing huge sombreros posed for photos while seated in the donkey cart.
“Where’s Fin?” Bobbie wondered aloud.
Bobbie looked worried, and that made Nell ask, “Do you two have something going or what?”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Whaddaya think I mean?” Then Nell added, “Of course it’s none of my business except I hate to see a girl like you get all messed up with a guy like Fin.”
“A guy like Fin?” Bobbie said, just as he came outside, looking the wrong way.
Then Fin spotted Shelby reeling across Revolución, barely dodging traffic. Fin followed after them with Nell and Bobbie bringing up the rear.
Now that it was early evening young Americans were milling everywhere, stopping only long enough to buy more beer cans to toss from car windows. A dozen drunken kids were hanging from the patio of a restaurant directly over their heads, yelling, “Cool it, Pancho!” to a harried traffic cop on the corner.
“Let’s move outta the way,” Bobbie said, “before one a those dweebs hunks a bellyful on our heads.”
“Keep an eye on Pate and Durazo,” Fin said. “Something’s going down. A guy came in and talked to them.”
“Probably a pimp,” Nell said.
“I don’t think so,” Fin said. “The conversation was very …”
“Intense?” Bobbie asked.
“Right,” Fin said. “It was very intense.”
“They’re just shopping, for chrissake,” Nell said. “Intense.”
Since they now had more time to kill, Abel wanted to keep the ox out of bars. He’d never seen his partner so wild-looking, not even on the night when he’d kicked the biker senseless.
“We got lotsa time,” Shelby said. “Let’s go git our knobs jobbed!”
“We walk, Buey!” Abel said. “Joo are drunk already.”
“Me, drunk? Are you mental? I kin drink two quarts a that cheap tequila and not even feel it!”
“Too much speed,” Abel said.
“Naw, this ain’t even good cringe,” Shelby said. “I’m jist mellow.”
Abel said, “Le’s go see jacket, Buey. We go down to pasaje. Good down there.”
Shelby was getting twitchier. He was wrinkling his nose like a hungry rabbit. He jerked his head this way and that every time he spotted something that gleamed, sparkled, or shone. He was blinking and snapping his fingers. And he’d started sweating.
Shelby’s anxiety level climbed in relation to their descent down the steep concrete stairway into the narrow passageways below the avenue. Shops were jammed cheek by jowl in a rabbit warren of arcades. There they sold ponchos and sarapes and papier-mâché birds as big as a human being, and velvet paintings, jewelry, souvenirs, curios and leather goods galore. Shelby stopped for a moment and played with a dangling Bart Simpson puppet. Everywhere he looked there were Bart Simpson dolls and figurines. He was getting light-headed and staggered more.
An old Indian woman with a face like a walnut, all bundled inside a sarape with violent stripes, startled Shelby by clicking castanets in his face. She laughed at him toothlessly, and a small boy next to her shook some hissing red maracas at him, hissing like rattlesnakes. “Good price, meester,” the boy said, and Shelby feverishly wondered if the kid had ringworm.
“All the peoples own their shops.” Abel tried to talk to him, but the ox was getting dizzy and wasn’t listening.
He wanted to stop for some cringe, but Abel made him walk. Shelby was afraid to get left behind, and he started feeling a sliver of panic behind his ear somewhere. It was like a shivery cold blade, and he was breathing faster in huge gulps.
Everywhere there were piñatas, and puppets and cardboard dancing figures in the shapes of skeletons and witches and goblins.
“Guess they celebrate Halloween here, huh?” Shelby said, leaning against a block wall to steady himself, his Grateful Dead T-shirt damp and sticky.
Abel saw that the ox’s face was flushed and his pupils were dilated. “Tomorrow ees El Día de los Muertos,” he said. “Day of the Dead. For two days the dead peoples they come home.”
“Whaddaya mean come home?” The ox just couldn’t stop blinking and twitching. He didn’t like this voodoo shit. And he couldn’t get enough air down there.
“We tell them welcome home. We burn candle at the cemetery and we put many flower on the path to their house. We feex altar for them. Berry eemportant day.”
“I don’t wanna see no dead relatives,” Shelby said, looking around at a life-sized witch hanging at eye level. He had an urge to kick that bitch clear off her broom!
“Eet ees no’ so sad eef there ees a day when the dead ones can return. My mamá, she see my papá every year. Eet ees true. The dogs bark always on the Day of the Dead. The dogs, they know.”
“What the fuck do they do when they come back?”
“We put out the bread for them. Sweet bread and chocolate and salt. They eat and they watch over their family. Then they go back to the graveyard. The leetle dead childrens they play weeth the toys we leave for them. We make the bread eento leetle animals for the dead childrens. My mother, she always puts out the mole. My father use to love mole. And some beers for my dead brother. He use to like beer. We have lots of beers and tequila in the cemetery on El Día de los Muertos.”
“I seen them cemeteries on TV,” the ox said. “They ain’t like ours with our little flat stones. You got humongous stones with pictures of the people on them and fences around these sorta walk-in graves. It looks like Munchkinland. Bunch a creepy little houses for dead people.”
“Ees berry beautiful our cemetery,” Abel said. “Many colors and pretty stones.”
The ox said, “You people’re Catholics, ain’tcha? I thought Catholics ain’t allowed to believe in that pagan zombie shit.”
Abel said, “We Católico but we use to have Indian gods long time ago. They was berry strong gods, ’mano.”
They started strolling again. Colors and exotic shapes swirled around Shelby Pate. The colors of Mexico were too vibrant, the lights too hot. He stumbled into a Ninja Turtle piñata made of cardboard. His body temperature had gone vertical and he was nearing meltdown.
Abel said to him, “Joo don’ do no more speed, Buey! I tell you!”
They found themselves in a passageway where there were less exotic shops selling Guess? and Ralph Lauren, and Fila. Shelby calmed down a bit, and stopped at a display window full of soft Mexican gold jewelry.
“Hey, dude!” he yelled to Abel. “I gotta buy somethin fer my bitch!”
But Abel had walked ahead and had turned the corner past a very narrow passageway where shopkeepers had installed overhead flashing colored lights, like in the Bongo Room.
Shelby lost sight of Abel for a moment and staggered into the wrong passageway. The smell of new leather overwhelmed him, conjuring images of dead animal carcasses. The winking colored lights bedazzled him. The passageway got too n
arrow! The colors of Mexico kept blazing away at him! Skeletons and witches dervished all around!
There was another Indian woman squatting in the passageway. Her bare feet looked like they’d never been washed. A little boy with her was even grimier. On a spread-out blanket was a handful of chewing gum, and the little boy said to Shelby: “Chicle? Chicle?”
Shelby Pate bellowed, “Noooooo!” and started running away from the boy into another passageway. And he still couldn’t find Abel. And the colors-the swirling vibrant Mexican colors-were enveloping him!
Then he whirled and saw a man moving toward him in that demon cloister. The man was his age, perhaps older. The man was three feet tall. He did not walk on legs, but on stumps that ended six inches below his buttocks. The stumps were padded with leather for “walking.” The most grotesque part was that protruding from between his stumps in front was a tiny deformed bare foot. At first, Shelby thought it was a Halloween prank. A fake foot sticking out between the little man’s stumps. But when the man plodded past him he saw another foot protruding from between his stumps in the back. Two deformed bare feet which would never support a human being-growing out of what should have been his thighs!
“How’d you get like that?” Shelby cried out to the little man. “Did they dump poison in your momma’s water supply?”
Of course the man didn’t understand Shelby, and may not even have heard. He just plodded on. Shelby followed him. He watched the little man laboriously climb every step, one stump at a time, toward the avenue above.
“WAS YOUR MOMMA POISONED OR WHAT?” Shelby bellowed.
He was reeling now, and he pawed at the concrete wall of the passageway for support. His hand pressed not concrete but a molded plastic face: a death’s-head. Lining the wall for a distance of twenty feet were the faces of death, like the skulls painted on the drums of poison.
He was hollering for Abel when the young Mexican appeared and grabbed him by the arm, saying, “Why you yell, Buey? Wha’ happen, ’mano?”
“Oh, man!” Shelby blubbered. “Where you been? I got lost! It’s weird down here! Get me back up to the world!”
“I tol’ joo, Buey. Speed mess up the brains!” Abel said.
Fin, Nell, and Bobbie had split up, with Bobbie trailing behind Shelby Pate. She’d witnessed his extraordinary behavior: flailing at piñatas, running in terror from a boy selling chewing gum, yelling gibberish at a pathetic legless man. He was hopelessly drunk or wired on drugs, or both.
When Shelby and Abel wandered along the last passageway, Fin joined her and he said, “Don’t follow there. Wait’ll they climb the steps.”
“Was that Pate doing the yelling?” Nell asked when she joined them.
“Yeah,” Bobbie said. “I got a feeling he isn’t doing much for U.S.-Mexican relations.”
“You shoulda seen him at the Bongo Room,” Fin said. “He enters a joint like a Molotov cocktail.”
Nell asked Fin something that she was curious about. “What goes on in those nightclubs?”
Fin said, “The animal rights people who never appreciated what women used to do for the welfare of Great Danes and burros apparently have had their way. Their stage shows’re about as racy as a high school assembly.”
Shelby Pate was drenched and popeyed by the time Abel led him up the concrete stairway.
“I feel like there ain’t no more world up there!” Shelby said as he climbed, looking at a patch of sky as gray as ashes.
“The world ees there,” Abel said, “but joo won’ be een the world berry long eef joo don’ stop the speed.”
When they were halfway up the steps, Shelby started taking in massive gulps of air. Suddenly, he grabbed Abel by the front of the shirt and said, “You gotta tell me, dude, about them dead kids! If you put out toys ’n cake ’n stuff, how do ya know the kid’s gonna find the right house?”
“The dead peoples, they know, ’mano,” Abel assured him. “Ees hard for them to remember the way but they weel find eet. They find their way home.”
Shelby held on to his partner and said, “Will that kid come home tomorra? Will he get to see his momma again? That kid with the ringworm?”
Abel cried, “Goddamn, Buey! I get seek and tire’ of goddamn reeng-worms! I don’ wan’ to hear no more goddamn reeng-worms!”
“But will he come home, Flaco?” Shelby demanded, with inflamed horrified eyes.
CHAPTER 24
The traffic on Revolutión was nearly bumper-locked. Young Americans hanging out of car windows were whistling, clapping, yelling, thumping on car doors, flipping the bird at pedestrians, cutting off cars, mooning any female older than twelve, and spewing the contents of their stomachs onto the streets of a country they considered third rate and Third World.
In short, it was a scene that might be replayed in just about any U.S. city if the police were underpaid, underfunded, undermanned, undermined, and as desperately corrupt as the police of Tijuana.
At the corner of Calle 5, two U.S. servicemen in civilian clothes with telltale whitewall haircuts were involved in a punch-out with three students wearing UCLA sweatshirts. Fin stopped to watch for a few seconds, then turned to Nell and Bobbie and said, “That’s a mismatch. UCLA students’re for Clinton, and everyone knows that white Democrats can’t fight.”
“Who’re you voting for?” Bobbie wanted to know.
“Perot, of course,” Fin said. “He’s not a professional politician.”
“Neither was that other nut, Rasputin,” Nell said, “but he still managed to wreck his government.”
“Perot’s not a bad choice,” Bobbie said. “He was a navy man.”
“Puh-leeze!” said Nell, but then she spotted trouble, and said, “Uh-oh. One of our boys needs to call nine-one-one. Or nueve-once, as they might say down here.”
Shelby Pate had just become one of the hundred or so Americans who would throw up on the streets of Tijuana that evening.
“Gross!” Bobbie said. “He’s hunkin all over the sidewalk!”
“Let that be a lesson,” Fin said. “Stick to high-grade tequila. And none of that stuff with a worm in it, even if you’re sure the worm’s dead.”
Nell said, “Wonder if he’s puking up live animal parts, or what?”
After Shelby got finished vomiting, he and Abel continued to weave their way along Revolución, pausing only for Shelby to terrorize a bunch of college kids. They were blocking the sidewalk and encouraging a frat brother to do a semi-striptease for the benefit of a coed hanging out the window of a restaurant overhead. The stripteaser danced to heavy-metal sounds coming from a boom box that could knock the fillings right out of your mouth.
Bobbie said, “They’re all trying not to notice Pate.”
Fin said, “Only reason anyone ever risks eye contact with a guy like that is so they can describe him later to a police artist.”
Nell said, “I hope little Juliet dumps her chamber pot on Romeo while he’s boogeying.”
The investigators watched as Shelby Pate staggered up to the striptease kid, grabbed him by the neck, and sailed him like a Frisbee into the traffic lane, where another carload of college types had to brake to keep from running him down.
While Abel pleaded with Shelby to move on, the ox planted his size 13 EEE’s and glared at all the other students. They took a gander at this blazing destroyer in his nightmare costume of biker black, and suddenly started to get extremely interested in shop items, such as silver buckles, Mexican blankets, and velvet paintings of Michael Jackson’s gloved hand.
Nell said, “Before the night’s over I bet he just about wrecks any chance of ever getting elected to public office.”
Bobbie said, “Wonder what’s it like for Durazo, being on the town with that nonevolved mammal?”
“About like being circumcised with draft beer as an anesthetic,” Fin said. “He’s doing his best to get killed.”
“Not quite his best yet,” Nell said. “But he’ll flat-line before he’s much older.”
Bobb
ie said, “Dudes like him’ll violate any law, including gravity. A walking reign of terror.”
Fin said, “I bet he’s never changed those jeans. Just puts on a different rocker T-shirt and away he goes.”
“He’d be easy to buy for,” Nell said.
The truckers stood looking in the window of a pharmacy where a line of worried, hopeful, or frightened Americans were buying Retin-A, minoxidil, and AZT over the counter. Then they moseyed around the corner and vanished.
The three investigators ran to the next corner but Abel and Shelby were nowhere in sight.
Nell crossed the street and discovered a narrow passageway. Ten feet inside the dark passageway was an arch lit by a pencil of neon. It said, SOMBRAS.
“Find something?” Fin called out.
Nell yelled, “This must be a nightclub or restaurant. Let’s try it.”
“Are you two packing?” Bobbie asked, when they stood at the mouth of the passage.
“No way,” Nell said.
“Not on your life,” Fin said. “If we got caught down here carrying concealed weapons, they’d just say: Badge? I don’t want to see no steenking badge! And we’d end up in the Tijuana jail. They don’t want any foreigners being armed.”
“I’m packing,” Bobbie said, looping the purse strap over her shoulder. “And I’m glad.”
She led the way down the corridor between two windowless concrete walls of neighboring buildings. They walked perhaps thirty feet before they heard music. The closer they got, the louder it got. Not the heavy metal blaring on Revolución, this was Mexican folk music.
Then they found themselves in a small open patio with a fountain in the center and a pepper tree in a tile planter off to one side. Double wooden doors with huge iron pulls separated them from the festive music inside.
Fin opened the door and Nell took a peek. A white-haired proprietor in a dark blue suit and a pale blue necktie said, “Welcome to Sombras. How many een your party?”
Finnegan's week Page 24
