Fifty Grand (22 page)

“You could make a lot more money in L.A.,” I tried.

“So could you.”

Angela spat. “You’re both crazy,” she muttered. “Come on, I need an answer.”

“I’m not going,” I said.

“Me either,” Paco agreed.

Angela nodded. “Well, it’s your funeral,” she said in English.

I hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. Paco hugged her. She ran across the parking lot and Luisa helped her into the VW.

They waved as they drove out, honking the horn and flashing the lights like they were going to a fair, which I suppose they were, after this shitty town.

Lucky they left when they did. Twenty minutes after they made the highway Esteban’s Range Rover pulled in.

Paco and I retreated to the kitchen to prepare dinner but one of Esteban’s remaining goons must have told him what had happened, because soon after we heard him yelling and screaming and running from room to room to see who was missing. When he found us in the kitchen he wasn’t relieved, he was pissed off. “They didn’t want you? What’s your fucking problem?” he demanded.

“Watch your language, there’s a lady present,” Paco said.

Esteban snorted, glared at us, and then left without saying anything more.

“Dinner?” Paco asked.

“I’ll make something,” I said, more than happy, again, to cook for someone else. For a man.

I opened the freezer and found strip steak. I fried it in garlic and olive oil.

We could still hear Esteban outside yelling and ranting like a child but we ignored him. In another pan I fried squash and plantains. Paco put on the rice.

He cut me two kiwifruits and an orange.

The juice ran over his fingers and for a moment I wanted him to feed me the fruit from his sticky hands. His hair had fallen over his face again and he smelled of pine and sun.

I took a beer from the fridge and pressed it against my forehead and asked him to set the table.

There were at least a score of other people in the motel at that moment and most of them worked for Esteban, but even so, for some reason, when he’d calmed down he came back to us.

He was carrying a bottle of tequila and three glasses.

“Excuse me,” he said when he saw that we were eating.

“Pull up a chair,” Paco said.

“Join us,” I agreed.

I halved my steak and gave him rice and a tortilla.

He poured three measures of tequila.

“Salud,”
he muttered.

We knocked back the tequila and Esteban refilled our glasses.

“Eat something,” I said.

He ate. “Not bad,” he admitted.

“How are you doing after this morning?” I asked him.

Esteban grunted and told Paco an abbreviated and much more heroic account of this morning’s episode with the sheriff.

“Sheriff seems to have a lot of power around here,” I said.

“Don’t worry about him. I have him in my pocket. He’s a fool, he acts big but he has the brain of a cow.”

“I heard some of the guys say he was in the war. He was in Iraq,” Paco said.

“No, no, not this war, the first one. He was in the Marines. He was in Kuwait. Not this one,” Esteban said with a dismissive sniff.

“He is a frightening man,” I found myself saying.

And he did frighten me. Why was he at the garage? Why was he looking into the accident? What was
his
angle? Something Ricky missed?

“Worry not, little rabbit. He is nothing. If this were Mexico I would deal with him, but here . . .” Esteban muttered and waved his hand in the air with contempt.

“He seems to have a finger in a lot of pies,” I asked, probing perhaps too hard. Esteban glanced at me, took another sip of tequila. His eyes narrowed a little and even Paco gave me a second look.

Too many questions.

I played meek, eating, looking down at my plate. I tuned out as the boys talked soccer. Esteban swallowed tequila, two shots for every one of ours.

Finally he stopped eating, banged the table with the flat of his hand, looked at me, time traveled back to the end of our conversation.

“No, don’t worry about him. He thinks he’s a player. He thinks he runs this town. If truth be told, it’s me—I run it. He doesn’t know half of what’s going on. Not half of it. Motherfucker, he’ll get his one day, you’ll see. You’ll see.”

His eyes dark, violent.

I thought about his Range Rover.

Of course, as Ricky pointed out, if you were very stupid, or very bold, you could hit a man, kill him, and never bother to get the car repaired at all, just drive around without a care in the world, knowing that up here the life of a dead Mex wasn’t worth a goddamn thing.

Esteban swallowed the last of his steak, smacked his lips. His cheeks were red, his face puffed.

I switched the conversation back to sports and Esteban tried to explain the difference between rugby and American football. Of all the subjects I wasn’t interested in, this proved to be near the top.

Time dragged.

When he was finished with his meal Paco thanked me solicitously and gave Esteban such a black look that despite his mood he remembered his manners. “Oh, this was perfect, María, thank you so much for making it for us,” he said. “There’s nothing like good food to raise your spirits.”

“It’s just something I threw together,” I replied, finding that I wasn’t immune to the compliment.

“No, no, it was delicious,” Esteban replied.

We had no sweetmeats but we had cigarettes and the rest of the tequila.

We moved together to the upstairs balcony of the motel.

Esteban stared at us and shook his head. “They didn’t trust you. Too new. Fuckers. Ungrateful fuckers. I’ll show them,” he said, and he stomped off to his suite at the east end of the motel.

“He’s drunk,” I said to Paco.

“No, he can hold it better than that,” he replied.

But either I was right or Esteban had serious mental problems, because a couple of minutes later he came out of his room with a hunting rifle. He shot it into the woods half a dozen times yelling
Chinga tu madre
and other obscenities, and when he tired of that he went into his room and turned on his Mexican polka music at full blast, singing along, shouting the lyrics over the desultory sound of electric accordions.

“This place is messed up. We should have gone to L.A. with the others,” Paco said sadly.

“You should have gone, I need to be here,” I replied.

Paco looked at me for a long time. He could sense that I was keeping something back. “Tell me,” he said, at last.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said weakly.

“Oh, I know this one,” Paco said.

I listened to the tune but I didn’t recognize it.

“I don’t know it.”

“Really? It’s called ‘Ghost Dance,’ it’s very popular. It’s about the Day of the Dead,” Paco said, giving me another skeptical look.

“Blood and death! Blood and death!” Esteban was shouting until he grew hoarse.

Eventually the tape stopped and someone helped Esteban into bed.

The clouds cleared. Mars rose between the branches of a blue spruce, and after Mars, Venus and then the big glassy seashore of stars, the Via Lactea.

“Hell with this, let’s go to bed,” I muttered.

Paco smiled.

“Separately,” I clarified.

“Of course,” he replied with an even bigger smile.

But neither of us moved.

We sat there, smoking, listening to the silence and gazing at the Milky Way.

It was quiet now and I felt strangely at ease here in the town where my father had found comfort and lived and loved. “It won’t last,” I said.

“It never does,” Paco said.

It never does because waiting in the wings are blood and death.

“Blood and death,” I whispered, and Paco grinned.

E
steban prodded me awake at four-thirty in the morning. “Can you drive a car?” he asked.

“Wha?”

Paco woke on the other bed. “I can drive,” he said.

Esteban shook his head. “No, we need you at the construction site. We’re against a deadline there. We get penalized a thousand dollars a day if we’re not finished by Christmas. The Ortegas going to L.A. has really screwed us.”

“Yeah, I can drive,” I said.

“Good, come on, let’s go.”

“What time is it?”

“Come on.”

“At least let me go to the bathroom.”

“Hurry.”

In five minutes we were outside in the Range Rover. Esteban’s right arm was in a homemade sling.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Drive downtown, we’ll swing by Starbucks, it opens at five.”

“And then where to?”

“Wyoming.”

“Wyoming?” I said with surprise. “Wyoming’s the one with the Mormons and the—”

“No, no, that’s Utah. It’s just up the road, couple of hours. Come on, foot on the brake, turn the key, yeah, that’s it.”

I pulled out of the parking lot and made the turn for downtown. Across the street from the motel a big rented Toyota Tundra with New York plates was parked in a turning circle. I took no notice of the car but my cop brain saw a man apparently sleeping inside.

At the Starbucks we were the first customers and the coffee was poor, almost undrinkable. Esteban seemed to like it, though, and he bought a couple of pastries to go with it. I had him get me two yellow bananas and a small bright orange.

Wyoming turned out to be ninety minutes north of Fairview. There were no direct highways but good double-lane roads with little traffic. An easy drive. Signs everywhere warning us about the dangers of elk, deer, and bears but I didn’t see any animals at all. A few big rigs, a lonely pickup or two.

The Range Rover was good, though it caught the wind on some of the exposed sections. I let the sheer take me over a little more than I should so we could talk about the car, but Esteban didn’t even notice.

“The car drives pretty well,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“A little top-heavy.”

“Yeah?”

“See you got a dent on the front.”

“What?”

“You had an accident?”

“Oh, that, that was nothing.”

“What happened?”

“Just fucking drive, María, it’s not far now.”

A little over the state line Esteban had me pull off the road onto a Park Service trail that led to a frozen lake surrounded by snow-covered forest.

We finally stopped in a small, empty parking lot.

“Ok, where are we?” I asked.

Esteban grinned. “You like it? This place is perfect. The Park Service closes it from Thanksgiving through April. No one comes here. They don’t allow ice fishing because although the lake freezes, the ice isn’t quite thick enough for the health-and-safety people. So it’s perfect.”

“We’re here to fish?” I asked.

“No. Don’t you listen? It’s not safe enough. You can walk on the ice but
it’s not safe enough for the little huts those ice fishermen build. No, rest assured no one will be out here the whole winter.”

“I don’t understand. So what are we doing here?”

“It’s a meet.”

The light dawned. “Oh, I see. Who are we meeting?”

“The men from Saskatchewan.”

I wanted to ask more but Esteban put a finger against his thick chapped lips. The conversation had terminated.

After a few minutes it got cold and he told me to turn the engine back on.

He blasted the heat and scanned the radio for a Spanish station but the mountains were blocking the ones from Denver and in Wyoming the music choices were between soulless white people singing songs about Jesus and soulless white people singing about their marital problems.

As 7:00 a.m. approached, Esteban killed the radio and turned off the car. He removed the key and put it in his pocket.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

Esteban reached into the glove compartment and pulled on a ski mask.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked.

He opened the passenger door, went to the back of the Range Rover, and took out a sports bag and his hunting rifle. He came back around to the driver’s side of the car, gave me the bag.

“Listen to me, María, it’s very simple. You give them the bag, they’ll give you a bag. There’s no need to sample the merchandise and they have no need to count the money. We all trust each other. Just bag for bag. It’s that simple.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“I’ll be in the forest, covering you with my rifle,” he said. “Don’t worry, I can still shoot with my arm like this, and despite my stupidity last night, believe me, I’m pretty good.”