The Dogs of Mexico

by John J. Asher

  The bus droned on. Ana slept at his side. He slipped into a troubled reverie of half-sleep in which the events of the last few days played over and over in surreal variations.

  The afternoon drifted toward evening.

  He roused himself, trying to shake the malevolent images corrupting his mind. Ana lay curled in the seat, his jacket drawn over her shoulders. He closed his eyes again, massaged them with thumb and forefinger.

  She cleared her throat. “You awake?”

  He stretched, looked at his watch. “Yeah. You catch yourself some z’s?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Five-thirty. You hungry? There’s a vending machine back there.”

  She lowered her gaze. “I need to ask you something.”

  He suffered a moment of apprehension. “Sure. Fire away.”

  “What did Helmut mean, you know, when he said…when he said you had escaped from a mental institution?” She studied him in earnest. “That is what he said, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I wonder how he got hold of that?”

  “It’s true then?”

  “I told you how I used to work a little land?”

  “And you were a boat salesman. And a farmer. And a spy. And a diamond smuggler. Yes. Tell me again. Everything. Please.”

  “Hey,” he said, an attempt at humor, “you’re not gonna start beating up on me again are you?”

  “Don’t you think I have a right to know?”

  He sobered. “Okay. I’ll tell you about my little set-to in the bug house, then you tell me about this guy Rivas.”

  She went still. Her eyes misted up. “That’s not fair.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “That had nothing to do with you.”

  “Big Spring had nothing to do with you, either.”

  She took tissues from her new purse. “That’s not the same, and you know it.”

  He settled himself, thinking about it. As much as he sympathized with her for all she had been through, he was a little resentful. He owed her nothing. After all, it had been her and Helmut trailing him across Mexico, not the other way around. It was a given that danger ignited desire, and now that the danger had cooled, he wondered whether desire might be cooling as well. It occurred to him that his feelings for her might not run as deep as he had previously supposed. Or, maybe it wasn’t that, but simply his reluctance to get into the past again—Nick, Tricia, everything that had made his life so unbearable since.

  He took a long breath. “It was an accident. First, you should know that.”

  Her eyes searched his.

  “My son. I killed my son.”

  She went pale, visibly withdrawing.

  “He liked going with me to feed the sheep. You load your pickup with sacks of cake, then drive to the pasture, and the sheep, they see you and they all come running. You take one of those forty-pound sacks out and walk around, spilling the cake out in a big circle behind the pickup. Then you drive on up a ways and dump another sack, spreading it so the sheep don’t bunch up on you. Nick, he—” Robert stopped, talking too fast, talking over himself.

  “Cake? For sheep?”

  “Pellets. A mix of cottonseed meal, alfalfa, legumes and whatever, formed into cubes about the size of your thumb. You feed through the winter and sometimes when it doesn’t rain you feed through the summer.” He looked into the distance, visualizing, reliving it with the telling: “That seems like another whole lifetime, a whole other world ago.…”

  AN INDISTINCT GRAY line suggested the horizon, vague in the wintery distance. But the sun had begun to break through, refracting through prisms of ice coating the sparse vegetation—broom weed and buffalo grass, prickly pear and shin oak, yucca and scrub mesquite—Doctor Zhivago’s Russian winter in a West Texas cow pasture.

  Robert idled the pickup over the icy track at three to four miles an hour, even slower, crawling along the more rugged stretches, tap-tapping the brakes down shallow slopes of frozen shale. Six forty-pound sacks of cottonseed cake pellets in the pickup bed added a little traction.

  His four-year-old son Nick sat in the passenger seat, belted onto two pillows so he could see out.

  “Beautiful,” Robert said of the crystalline landscape. “Just beautiful.”

  “Bue-di-ful,” Nick repeated, mimicking Robert’s reverent tone.

  This, Robert mused to himself, is what it’s all about. These moments between assignments, my son with me, cozy in the cab, going to feed the stock.

  “Daddy!” Nick shouted. “Look! Doggies!” Nick pushed the seatbelt release, slipped out of the harness and stood forward, hand on the dash, his gaze fixed on three coyotes slinking over a ridge above the creek bed some fifty yards ahead.

  “Nick, you get back—” But the truck was sliding sideways out of the track to the passenger side. Robert quickly tap-tapped the brakes, but to no effect, picking up speed, trundling broadside down the frozen slope toward a sharp cut in the creek. He threw his hand out and caught Nick by one strap of his overalls as the truck slid over into the cut. But gravity dragged Robert partway from behind the wheel, his seatbelt jerking taut as a ledge of rock exploded through the passenger window in a spray of glass. Air bags popped out and then deflated. Coffee cup, mints and Emmylou Harris CDs spilled out of the console. Dust motes and gleaming pinpoints of frost floated in the diffused light of the cab, the truck on its side, wedged into the cut. Nick lay motionless against the passenger door below, eyes partly open, mouth slack, a trickle of blood from one nostril.

  “Nick!” Robert caught the door’s armrest overhead and lifted his weight enough to release his seatbelt, letting himself down, fumbling past the console into the awkward space. He felt the artery under Nick’s jaw, his own heart faltering. He grabbed the cell phone with its GPS from the glovebox and stood, banging his head against the driver’s door. He unlatched the door and slammed it back, springing its hinges. Head and shoulders clear of the doorframe, he dialed 911, then switched on the GPS.

  The operator picked up in Hardwater twenty miles to the north. Robert glanced at the GPS. “I have coordinates,” he shouted. “Hurry! For God’s sake, please hurry!” Life Flight would be leaving immediately.

  He dialed Tricia but at that moment he smelled gasoline. Before she could pick up, he slapped the phone shut and set about kicking the windshield out in order to remove Nick with the least amount of additional trauma. But the windshield with its plastic membrane sandwiched between layers of safety glass didn’t give easily. He managed to get the tire tool from behind the seat and beat the glass out, careful not to spark metal against metal.

  Twenty minutes later the ER helicopter whap-whapped down, whipping up a swirling fog glittering with pinpoints of ice.

  Robert sat on a ledge of rock some distance from the overturned pickup with its sacks of cottonseed pellets spilled into the creek bed. He held Nick cradled in his arms, rocked him back and forth, refused to let go, carried the body aboard himself.…

  ANA LISTENED AS Robert told about the death of his son. She wanted to feel sympathy, and she did in some clinical sense. But in truth she wasn’t experiencing the compassion, the intimate sharing of sorrow she might have felt only a day or so before. She wondered whether she had become desensitized, whether she might be suffering her own version of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. After all, she had just killed a man, and more, she was glad of it. Or maybe it was that she was finally seeing the world for what it really was—one big dog-eat-dog joke. Sympathy, compassion—these were the emotions of vulnerability and weakness, for losers when all was said and done.

  She took a breath, let it out. She thought of her brother, reliving once again the horror of his death. She wondered at how the two deaths she had been responsible for could affect her so differently.

  “We can’t do anything about yesterday,” she said to Robert, recognizing the truth of it, realizing, too, that knowing it logically was a world apart from knowing it emotionally.

  He listened, solemn.


  She touched his arm, whether by way of affection or in a condescending manner, she wasn’t sure. “Tell me about the state hospital. Everything. I do need to know. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  He sighed. “Tricia went to pieces. She blamed me. That’s understandable. But then I found out she was having an affair. I guess I was falling apart too, because I dragged him out of his office and beat the crap out of him right there in his bank. The police came. They beat me up, put me in intensive care overnight, and the next thing I know they’re hauling me over to the state hospital in Big Spring.”

  “That’s how you got the scar? The police?”

  “A concussion, along with a hairline fracture.”

  “Helmut said you escaped.”

  She listened as he told about walking off from the hospital, finding Nick’s room empty and blowing up his own house. “You pretty much know the rest,” he said.

  She understood revenge. In fact she felt a touch of envy, if not admiration. It was a thing she would like to be capable of herself—blowing up a house in justifiable retribution. Nevertheless it was so far out of the norm it scared her. If everyone acted on their darker impulses it would be an even worse world of violence and chaos. Consequently she was once again seeing him in a questionable light. In addition, he could be lying again for all she knew. Equally disturbing, there was no guessing as to the atrocities he had been involved in while with the CIA. From what she had seen they were without moral boundaries. The short of it was, she simply didn’t know him and doubted she ever would. But then, did anyone ever know anyone else, completely?

  She shuddered, intuiting that some otherworldly power was setting the stage for his final act. Perhaps that was why she felt herself withdrawing—her self-protective mental machinery kicking in. Then, too, maybe he really was crazy. After all, he claimed he had seen an old woman alongside the road where she had seen nothing. At the time, she thought she had simply missed it. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  “That was a little radical,” she said. “Blowing up your own house.”

  As if reading her mind, he said, “Maybe I really was a little nuts there for a while. But then, normal people are known to act out under enough stress.”

  That, she knew, was true enough too. “So you went to Miami.”

  “Right.”

  “Where you took a job selling boats.”

  “No, I was on the streets. One of those homeless guys. Then I took up landscaping. Yard work.”

  “And now you’re working for the CIA again.”

  “Wrong again. There’s this guy, Duane Fowler, your friend Flax. He knew about my little home improvement job back in Texas. He came down and offered me this gig. Nothing to do with the Company. It was a chance to get back on my feet.”

  “No matter that it was illegal?”

  “You have any idea how many people the De Beers Consolidated Mines have killed? Illegal? You’re the moralist, you tell me.”

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “Besides, as far as I knew, those diamonds were in the hands of terrorists.” He looked at her, his face broken and bruised. “Now you know all of my darkest secrets.”

  That, she knew, wasn’t true, either. His darkest secrets would forever be his, only hinted at perhaps by an occasional look in his eyes. But never in words. She rejected the sympathy she had begun to feel for him, rejected the vulnerability that went with that sort of thing.

  “Maybe,” she said impulsively, “people have to know the worst about one another in order to appreciate the best.”

  “You’ve figured out that they planned to get rid of us, once they got their hands on that canister?”

  “No, no. Helmut wouldn’t do that,” she said, though she knew now that men were capable of doing anything they were capable of dreaming up.

  “Well, you’re gonna believe what you want about that. And you’re wrong about the CIA always being the bad guys. There are incompetent lowlifes, sure, but we have the best intelligence gathering organization in the world. If the American people knew everything the CIA was doing, they’d get down on their knees in gratitude.”

  “I’d probably move to Canada.”

  He smiled a little.

  In the silence that followed, she thought over all he had told her. She also recalled how he had come to her rescue the night before when she was walking out on him, taking on two men on her behalf. As furious as she had been at him moments before, that had awakened something in her; she had wanted him then more than she had ever wanted any man.

  She sighed, determined to clear the air. “Okay. Rivas.”

  He looked at her, perplexed for a moment, then dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “No, you needn’t go into that. Really. Your past is none of my business. Besides, I don’t care what you’ve done.”

  He could say that, but if they remained together she would never hear the end of it. It was her experience that men were too possessive to let something like that go.

  “He was an official in the Mexican Consulate in Mexico City. I left Helmut and moved in with him. In less than a week, I discovered he was married to a Venezuelan heiress. I went back to Helmut.” She took tissues from her purse. “Now you know just how pathetic I really am.”

  He surprised her by putting his arm around her. She gave in to it, snuggled against him in a moment of comfort. They rode in silence…the whispering drone of the bus…indistinct conversation across the isle…she, thinking that maybe all of their secrets really were out, that it might be possible to begin again after all…drifting finally into sleep.

  SHE WOKE TO the antic noise of a mindless comedy blaring from the TV screens, the moaning of the bus. Robert slept at her side, his arm still around her.

  Dusk had crept over the countryside, the landscape changed. Thousands of cacti rose, skylighted above barren hills, arms flailed up in black silhouette against the last red light, as if aghast at what was beheld of the world.

  She slipped back into the dreamy underworld, falsely soothed—she thought, briefly reconsidering—by Robert’s arm around her; even babies found momentary comfort in the arms of strangers.

  40

  Reentry

  ROBERT ROUSED HIMSELF from the half-conscious world of fitful dreams. A few crumbling shacks rose up out of the night along either side of the highway and multiplied—mile upon mile—hovels of scrap tin, plastic sheeting, cardboard. Countless fires guttered among unfinished cinderblock walls. Dump dwellers scrabbled in the refuse. The stink of poverty seeped through the air conditioning as the bus rolled down out of the mountains into the outskirts of Mexico City.

  He touched Ana’s arm. “Hey,” he said softly.

  She snatched her hand back, waking with a start.

  “We’re coming into the city. You might want to wake up.”

  “Yes…thank you.” She looked out at the slums gliding past, shook her head, massaged her temples with her fingertips.

  In another half hour the bus pulled into TAPO, the Central Camionera de Oriente on Calle Zaragoza with its smell of diesel fuel and sweating humanity. They watched through the windows for any police who might be standing by to intercept them. A couple of uniformed officers idled among the crowds, but they didn’t appear to be looking for anyone in particular. A clock on the wall read 10:10 p.m.

  They got off with their luggage and stood for a moment, disoriented in the pulsing mob.

  “I think we have to go to the north station for the bus to Acuña,” Ana said.

  “Think you can handle another twenty-four hours on a bus?”

  She hesitated. “Maybe we should stay here tonight. Leave in the morning?”

  “I buy that. Get some food. A hot shower. A little sleep.”

  “We have to pass through the historic district to get to the north station. We could stay at the Hotel Hidalgo, where we met?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No?”

  “Never enter by the same door you leave.”
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br />   “Okay, how about the Majestic? It’s an old hotel, right on the zócalo. Actually, it’s less than a dozen blocks from the Hidalgo. Is that too close for you?”

  “You ever stayed there?”

  “No, but it’s supposed to be old-world nice.”

  “I don’t want to stay any place Helmut might consider.”

  She looked at him, quizzical.

  “Truthfully,” he said, “I doubt he’s still alive, but we’re not taking any chances.”

  She seemed to think that over. “We could go ahead and make reservations for tomorrow, get our tickets now?”

  “If they start looking for us, I’d rather not have any paper trails.”

  She watched him, a touch of sadness in her smile. “The good spook.”

  Outside, a vendor wrapped pork tamales and two ears of steamed corn in foil, placed them in a plastic bag and then in a brown paper bag. Robert ordered a second bag of cubed melon.

  A Toyota taxi with a silhouette of an airliner on the door let them out at the Hotel Majestic on the corner of Madero and the city’s historic main square. The Majestic stood directly across from the National Palace and at a right angle to the Great Metropolitan Cathedral on the left.

  The Majestic’s lobby was small and old-world elegant—glass, bronze, carved wood. A couple of brass-tacked leather sofas nestled among leafy plants in big terracotta pots. A gurgling stone fountain built into the rear wall.

  He checked them in using the Edmond Haywood credentials. The elevator operator rose from her bench and took them up to the third floor, to a room facing the National Palace across the plaza. The rooms were laid out in a horseshoe configuration around an atrium, open from the second floor mezzanine to the sixth. The walkway around the mezzanine was fairly wide, cordoned off with an ornate parapet dripping with vines and flowers.

  The bed covers were neatly turned, a chocolate mint on each pillow alongside cheerful table lamps. He sat in a club chair, lay his head back and closed his eyes while Ana showered.

  He roused himself when she came out of the bathroom in her pajamas.