North of the Border

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Of course not,” I tried to soothe her.

  “He says he can provide a better home. His new woman owns a house with a fenced-in run, and she has a child for him to play with. Peanut wouldn’t have to be inside alone all day. He can’t do that, can he? He can’t just take my dog. I want you to talk to him. Tell him he can’t take my dog.”

  “Of course not. But I can’t talk to Ken directly; he’s not my client. I’ll talk to his attorney and see what I can work out. We’ll try to appeal to his better side.”

  “He doesn’t have one.”

  “Maybe his attorney does.”

  “Ha!” said Judy. “I’ve made a list of everything in the trailer that belongs to me, and that’s everything. I want it all, and I’ve changed the locks on the trailer so he can’t get in.”

  “What about the chain saw?” I asked her. “I understand Ken feels that’s his, and his boots, his motorcycle helmet, and his Janie Fricke records. He wants those too. Perhaps if you gave him what he wants, he would return Peanut. It’s worth a try.”

  “Oh, no. I want them.”

  “What on earth are you going to do with a chain saw?” I had a quick flash of Judy Bates going to work at Hairport, chain saw at her hip.

  “I just want it, that’s all.”

  I sighed.

  “Wednesday’s my day off,” she said. “I want to come by then and bring you my list.”

  “You can leave it with Anna,” I replied. “I’m going to Mexico.”

  It was a trying day. Around five the Kid came by and picked me up in the Rabbit. I was used to seeing him on different ground—the shop, or my bedroom. Standing in the office with my key ring dangling from his hand he looked impossibly young and dirty in his greasy mechanic’s suit. But the Kid has a way of tilting his head and laughing that makes you think everything will be all right, and as long as he thought so, I was willing to believe it. Carl was so impossibly rich and clean, but with Carl one had the feeling that nothing would turn out quite right, that he would always settle, settle, and settle.

  The Kid went on ahead of me while I gave Anna some papers to type tomorrow.

  “Who’s that?” she whispered. “He’s kind of cute.”

  “My mechanic,” I said.

  I got into the passenger’s seat, leaned back against the headrest, and let the Kid drive. “It’s been a tough day,” I told him.

  “Everything’s okay with El Conejo,” he patted the dash. “I gave him a tune-up, checked the points and plugs. He’s running real good now.”

  “Wait a minute, what’s that?” I asked. There, where the black hole had been, was a radio and a tape deck—and not just any radio, a Blaupunkt.

  “It was lying around. I like the music,” the Kid said. He turned it on. When it comes to music, the Kid knows one setting: loud.

  “Kid, you shouldn’t have.”

  “It’s nothing, chiquita,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  3

  SO I WAS going to Mexico. I prepared by popping a couple of cloves of garlic in the morning with my Red Zinger. It’s not bad if you cut them up in little pieces and swallow the pieces whole. Supposedly, you don’t smell like you had linguini with clam sauce for breakfast as long as you don’t chew. They say it keeps the parásitos away; even parásitos don’t want to live in a stomach full of garlic. Parásitos—Giardia Lamblia, amoebas—I had them all when I spent a year in Mexico deciding whether I wanted to go to law school. I had the grades but I didn’t have the will.

  Mexico was a balm: a mountain town with cobblestone streets, bougainvillea-splashed walls, serenades in the night, periodic trips to the beach in the back of a jouncing bus, and always the parásitos. But it had a certain charm then, going to the pharmacy, no prescription required, and ordering the drug that could cure your bugs for the day. Mexico, a lovely memory, always a possibility. I never forget that I can go back there and I follow the fluctuations of the peso the way other people watch the Dow-Jones average. If it ever gets to the point where I could live on a hundred fifty dollars a month again—if I ever have a spare hundred fifty dollars a month again—maybe I will go back.

  “Going to Mexico?” Brink sniffed when he saw me on Monday morning.

  “Juárez,” I replied.

  “That’s Mexico.”

  “Not exactly.” Juárez is a border town, not Mexico exactly, but not the U.S. either.

  He wrinkled his nose. “What for?” he asked casually, and began drawing little rosebuds on a scratch pad on my desk.

  “I’m doing some research for Carl Roberts.”

  “Carl Roberts?” If Brink had had any eyebrows, they would have buckled up like errant caterpillars. “I don’t know why we need to take on work for Carl Roberts. Seems to me we have enough work of our own,” he said in a tone that could be called petulant.

  “Well, maybe we do have enough work of our own; maybe we’re just not getting paid for what we do. The fact is, we are two months behind on the payments for the copier, the electricity bill is overdue, and we haven’t even paid last month’s rent.” It was a low blow. Brink and I agreed when we went into partnership together that I would handle the business end. We both knew that he was incapable of collecting a dime from a needy client. That’s why he needed me, and maybe why I needed him, and why we hired Anna to do the bookkeeping. But she wasn’t any better at it than we were. Too busy combing her hair.

  “That’s not my fault,” Brink said in a tone that was petulant. “You and I agreed—”

  “Okay, I shouldn’t have said that. But we never agreed that we wouldn’t take on work for other firms.”

  “But Carl Roberts? Haven’t you done enough of his dirty work? Don’t tell me he’s gotten a moving violation in Mexico?”

  It was his low blow. There are some things you should never tell anybody, especially your partner.

  “Why don’t you go outside and water the rocks?” I said.

  “Well,” he sniffed.

  “Look, I’m not going to do anybody’s dirty work, okay? And it’s strictly a one-shot deal. I am going to fly to Juárez, interview another attorney, tell Carl what I found out, bill him—at his rates—and that will be the end of it.”

  “I hope so,” said Brink, shuffling off to the kitchen and the Mr. Coffee.

  I had Anna call Licenciado Menendez-Jimenez, Carl’s adoption lawyer, and make an appointment for Wednesday afternoon. She told him my name and where I was from, but she didn’t tell him why I wanted to see him, and he didn’t ask. Apparently it was sufficient that I was a gringa. He was agreeable to three in the afternoon, postsiesta, if they still took siestas in Juárez. She made a reservation on the morning flight with a return the following day. I decided to spend the night in El Presidente, the best hotel in town, and only twenty-five dollars a night.

  I went to bed early, made sure the clock radio was set to KJOY, and fell asleep thinking about Señor Menendez and Carl. It seemed to me Carl was all wrong about this one, the result of a paranoia about Mexicans. I had done some research on Licenciado Menendez-Jimenez. He had been a famous divorce lawyer in Juárez in the days when divorces were a lot easier to obtain there than in the U.S. Now divorces are so easy you can do it yourself, but children are hard to come by, and you can’t do that yourself. Women have fewer illegitimate babies, and when they do, they keep them. A scarcity of babies in America, a surplus in Mexico; Licenciado Menendez-Jimenez filled a need.

  He got paid for it, too—up to twenty thousand dollars a child. An opportunist, no doubt, but I didn’t think he would be behind the nasty business of the note. There was too much to lose. I thought a more likely culprit could be found right in Albuquerque in the form of someone Carl had wounded in his endless pursuit of the just verdict. There were any number of suspects who could fit that category. In any case, it wasn’t my worry. I’d promised to interview Señor Menendez-Jimenez, and that was all I’d promised.

  I fell asleep, only to be awakened from the murky depths by the scream of the telepho
ne. A phone call in the night—that’s when bad news comes, ringing the bell before it. But I was sleeping so soundly when it rang that I was talking before I was awake enough to worry.

  “Hello,” I murmured in the seductive whisper of sleep.

  “Hi,” said a man at the other end, no one I knew.

  “Hi?”

  “How are you?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “No, of course not.” It seems ungrateful to let people know that they’ve waked you. I don’t know why.

  “I did, didn’t I?”

  “No, don’t be ridiculous.”

  “You don’t know who this is, do you? It’s Sam.”

  “Sam. Sure, of course, I do.”

  He laughed and then I did know, a touch of malice beneath the fun. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “the guy I met on the interstate. You never told me your name.” I was awake enough by this time to light up a cigarette.

  “Right. How you been?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Good. Like to buy you a drink sometime.”

  “I’ll buy; I owe you one.”

  “How about later in the week?”

  “Can’t. I’m going to Juárez.”

  “Why you goin’ down there?”

  “I have some business. A client we’re representing.”

  “No shit. I may be goin’ down there myself this week. It looks like Maria is gettin’ ready to come back. Gonna pick her up.”

  “That’s good she’s coming back.”

  “Right. Missed that woman.”

  “Sam, I got to get up early. It’s a long day tomorrow.”

  “Sure, sorry to wake you. Be seein’ you, Nellie.”

  4

  I FLEW TO El Paso, took a cab across the border and got to Juárez around noon. I checked into the hotel and had lunch on an outdoor patio with splashing fountains and chattering birds. Magenta bougainvillea splattered the wall, and the sun filtered through the leaves of a towering avocado tree made patterns on the floor. I ate something with beans, tortillas, and shredded lettuce. A señor wearing a white suit and Panama hat sat at an adjacent table and eyed me with sad longing, as if his heart would break if he didn’t have me that afternoon. It’s a performance repeated so often, you learn to admire the nuances if not the originality. He had a black mustache and white teeth, a diminutive Rhett Butler.

  “Muy buenas tardes, señorita,” he said, tipping his hat, as I paid the check and got up to leave.

  “Muy buenas tardes, señor,” I replied. In Mexico, at least, I wasn’t expected to look like a professional. I wore a white suit and a lavender blouse, unbuttoned at the neck. Show a little cleavage in Albuquerque and you’re considered a woman: untrustworthy. Mexico—already it made me want to discard the lawyer clothes and leave them in the desert like a used up skin.

  I was ready for Licenciado Menendez-Jimenez at three, but he wasn’t ready for me; still napping, perhaps. I sat in his outer office and waited, flipping through a copy of Vanidades featuring Princess Caroline and her babies and Jerry Hall and hers. I remembered Carl’s parting words: “Remember you’re not going down there to play softball.” Around three thirty the door opened. Menendez-Jimenez came out wearing an expression of oily welcome. Sweaty and on the plump side, he was wiping his forehead with a white handkerchief. I noticed a ring with a diamond the size of a pea on his little finger. He introduced himself and sprinkled me with a shower of apologies.

  “De nada, mucho gusto,” I said.

  “El gusto es mío, señorìta.” He shook my hand. “Come with me.”

  He led me into his office, which was not unlike mine: cluttered. Comfortably, I thought. It was done in new metal and old wood. He had a huge desk overflowing with papers and some gray metal file cabinets in the corner.

  “You are from Albuquerque,” he said, as if that explained something. “I have good friends there.”

  “Carl Roberts?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course, I know Señor Roberts.”

  I got right to the point, “That’s why I am here.” I handed him a note from Carl, stating that I was acting on his behalf and that Menendez could talk to me freely.

  “Señor Roberts, he is not in any trouble, I hope.” His brow furrowed as he read the note. He lit a Camel and offered me one; I took it.

  “Trouble? That depends on how you look at it. His practice is doing very well.”

  “Of course. He is very successful, no?”

  “Yes. He is thinking of running for public office next year.”

  “So I have been told.” He puffed at his cigarette and pushed some papers around on the desk.

  “Almost four years ago, on June seventeenth to be exact, you arranged an adoption for Carl Roberts and his wife.”

  “I don’t remember the date exactly, but I did arrange an adoption for him and his lovely wife. How is the child doing? Well, I hope.”

  “The child is fine. The father is worried.”

  “About what?”

  “About this,” I said, and I took the dirty note from my pocket and dropped it on his desk.

  “What is this?” He looked at the note with distaste.

  “Open it, please.”

  He opened it carefully as I had done, as if it had to be folded and unfolded along the exact same lines for the message to be revealed.

  “YOU STEAL MY BABY YOU PAY,” he read slowly. “What is this? I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, señorita, I do not.”

  “I gather that it is a reference to the child that Carl adopted through you.”

  “Impossible. Who would do such a thing?”

  “You tell me.”

  “But no one.”

  “There’s no one who knows who adopted that child? The mother, perhaps? Her family? Maybe they need money.”

  “Absolutely no one. Adoption records are sealed in Mexico.” He smiled. “And to tell you the truth, señorita, once these adoptions are arranged, I forget. So no one has that information, no one at all.”

  “And you can’t think of any reason why anyone in Mexico…”

  “Absolutely not.” He paused, and some of the jolliness seemed to be oozing out of him. “Surely, señorita, you are not suggesting that I had anything to do with… with… this.” He picked up the note with the tips of his fingers, as though it were a scorpion, and threw it at me.

  “I’m not suggesting anything at all. I was just wondering what you thought.”

  “What I think is that you should look elsewhere. There are men in your country who are capable of such an act; I assure you that I am not.” He puffed up like a bull snake, as if he could intimidate me with wounded pride.

  “Well,” I said, getting up. “I am staying at El Presidente tonight, and here is my address in Albuquerque. If you have any ideas about this, Mr. Roberts would like you to get in touch with me.” I handed him my card.

  “Of course,” he said automatically. He turned the card over in his bejeweled fingers. “You are so… pretty for an attorney.”

  “Not that pretty,” I said.

  Pretty enough, apparently. “Perhaps we could have a drink sometime?”

  “Call me,” I replied.

  We went through the mucho gustos again and the buenas tardeses and I left him behind his palatial desk lighting another Camel. I don’t think Mexico cares yet that you are what you eat and smoke and drink.

  Well, the cards had been laid on the table, I’d done what I said I would do and I’d ended up exactly where I had said I would. Señor Menendez had too much to lose to be sending out blackmail notes.

  I had dinner at the hotel—chicken with mole sauce and flan—and then I went into the bar to kill the evening. The room was dark, but sitting up there at the bar, soft as a moth in his white suit, was El Señor of the patio. His hands were idly spinning a glass bowl with a lighted candle in it.

  “Buenas noches,” I said, taking the stool next t
o him.

  “Muy buenas noches, señorita.” He turned, and the candle flame reflected briefly in his eyes before the curtain of languor and longing covered them again. His English was no good, my Spanish not great, but we got through the preliminaries. He was a salesman from Nuevo León in Juárez on business, of course. And me?

  “A lawyer,” I said. “I’m here on business, too.”

  “A lawyer?” he asked with polite disbelief.

  After the second margarita his English improved remarkably as he told me he wrote poetry and, with great sadness, that he wasn’t and never had been married.

  “Y tú?” he asked.

  “Me neither,” I said, one good lie deserving another.

  He sighed, as if he and I could make music from that out-of-tune institution. He did have beautiful soft eyes and hands that were never still. He played restlessly with a book of matches, striking a match, watching it burn, lighting another. I thought about it: his fingers fluttering on my thigh, the endearments in Spanish, the softness of his skin, his coal black hair, the heated fumblings, the embarrassment in the morning.

  Saved by the appearance of a waiter holding his hand up to his ear. “Telefono, señorita.”

  “Gracias,” I replied. “Mucho gusto, necesito salir,” I said to my friend.

  He took my hand. “Already? You are going already?” he asked, wilting in his white suit like a limp petunia.

  “I must. It’s a business call.”

  “Que lástima,” he sighed. What a pity. “You American women, all you think about is business.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I must go. Mucho gusto.” I left him leaning over his candle, staring sadly into the flame.

  I took the call in my room—Menendez-Jimenez. Trying to pronounce that name made me wish I had had one less margarita.

  “After you left here I was thinking; maybe I might be able to help you after all.” His fluency of the afternoon seemed to have vanished. Each word was pronounced with elaborate care, and I wondered if he had been drinking too. He paused. I waited. “There is some bad business, very bad business. If you could come over here I’d like to talk to you.”