Fifty Grand (32 page)

I don’t want to go for a walk. I don’t want to sit here.

Hell with this.

I lift the duvet, slide back underneath the cover, and sidle my way next to him.

“Jack,” I whisper but he’s out.

His breathing hushed, slow. One of my hairs falls on his face. His nose twitches.

What am I doing here with this lovely boy? The psalmist has words for you. But not me. I’m content to say nothing, to lose myself in the silence, to ripen in your good looks.

Oh, Jack, you’ll never get taken seriously as an actor with that face. You ought to be in Attica judging beauty contests between Hera and Aphrodite. You ought to be out in the earthblack woods, butterflies alighting at your passing, does sniffing the air.

You’re so un-Cuban. So finely sculpted—masculine, poised, confident. Like the statue of David I will never be allowed to travel to see. You can. You can do whatever you like. You’re one of those imperialist Yankees we read
about in high school. One of those white men who run the globe. Sure, I’ll meet your friends, Jack, and you can meet mine. Tell Paco he’ll never be a big cheese like you. Tell Esteban that this isn’t Mexico anymore. This is your land, Jack. You beat them all to it. You were here before Columbus slipped anchor for China. You were here first. Flying your
Enola Gay
. Singing “Jail-house Rock.” Bunny-hopping on the moon. Let me be here with you, Jack, let me stroke those washboard abs, that botticino marble skin, let me ride that long American cock and lick the sweat from your back.

I slide my hand between his thighs but the Ambien and martinis keep him down.

I’m leaving, Jack. I’m going soon. You’ll come see me? Defy the U.S. Treasury. Rendezvous in the Hotel Nacional. A good career move. Maybe they’ll put your picture up next to Robert Redford’s.

He grins in his sleep and I close my eyes. Feel his warmth. Lie there.

The winter sun burning through clouds. Ice melt. Water tap-tap-tapping on the window. My boy smiling in his dream.

I touch his cheek and his eyelashes flicker.

Wake up and we’ll skip this scene. I could be legal by noon. Drive me to the FBI office in Denver. This year alone five thousand Cubans have come over the border from Mexico, all of them now on the path to citizenship. Citizen Mercado and her boyfriend, Jack.

You like the sound of that?

And I’ll forgive Paul or Esteban or Mrs. Cooper.

María is the sovereign lady of forgiveness.

Forgive. Yes. I don’t even think I’d care if it was you, Jack. Not Youkilis, Youkilis covering for you somehow.

It wouldn’t matter, would it, Jack?

Uhh, he says in agreement.

I put my arm under him. My breasts press against his back.

Yes. Let’s slip away.

You’ll understand, Dad, won’t you? After all, what did you ever care about any of us? What were you thinking about on that slope? Did you see my face? Ricky’s? Not Mom’s. Probably you were drunk or high. Crying out for Karen or the girls you had on the side. Drunk and happy like you were the day you abandoned us in Santiago. Did you see me as you lay dying? You were not on my mind. I wasn’t even in Havana. Wild goose chase for a wife killer. Train to Laguna de la Leche. Reading one of Hector’s extensive
collection of banned books. Thucydides. Given to me as a birthday present. Yeah, that’s right . . . the day after my birthday. Well, Pop, did you even bother to look down on me on your way to eternity? You would have liked Pajero, near Laguna—a perfect shithole. Moonshine shacks, tin houses, open sewers. Our killer—of course—long gone. Girl on a bicycle brought me a message from town.
Señora,
a phone call from Havana. Phone call?
Sí, señora
. Back together on the bike. Two of us. East among the sunflowers. East into the dying sunflowers, the words of Pericles by the lake, while you were being unmade.

Ring-ring on a rickety black café phone from the thirties.

Ricky’s voice as distant as the moon.

How did you find me?

Listen, darling sit down, are you sitting? I’m sorry, Dad’s dead, some kind of accident in Colorado.

What? Where?

Colorado.

My first thought: Good riddance. Not one letter. Not one dollar.

But then the memories flooding back.

Crying and Ricky’s voice: I can get permission to go.

How?

Strings. Blow jobs.

Me laughing through tears.

Hang up the black Bakelite receiver.

The café owner, a police narc: Bad news?

Yeah. My father. Dead.

On a road in the mountains of Colorado.

That road, out there. Out the window.

Oh, Papa, there’s nothing I can do for you. This is the Castle of No Escape. And I like it here. Yuma, land of the Yankees. I like it. I asked for the key to my own dungeon, a thousand miles from the dandelions on the salt trail and the bean-fed boys and the red dirt fields and the teardrop skies.

That road.
That road
. There through the glass.

A creak on the deck outside.

Someone there. This time I’m certain.

I’m alert, fully awake, flooded with adrenaline. I sit up quickly, look for shadows on the balcony. Nothing, but I know I’m not imagining things—that was no squirrel or stray dog. That was boot on wood.

I throw back the duvet, jog to the fireplace, and grab a cast-iron poker with a vicious-looking hook at the end.

I undo the lock on the french doors and walk onto the deck, checking blind spots and the roof.

Fresh powder under my feet.

“Hola?”
I ask.

No one answers. But the birds are quiet.

The gate’s closed, no strange cars, nothing out of the ord—

Wait a minute. Bootmarks in the gravel. Bootprints coming to the house.

“Hello,” Sheriff Briggs says behind me.

I bite down a yell and turn.

He’s wearing an overcoat but I can tell he’s got the full uniform on underneath. He’s come as a cop.

“You scared me. I didn’t see you there,” I tell him.

He flashes the pearly grin, rubs the bottom of his chin.

“Yeah.”

He looks at my breasts through Jack’s T-shirt. Fishes into his pocket and pulls out a cigar. Other pocket, Zippo. I shouldn’t be waiting out here. It looks guilty. I should go back inside.

“Excuse me,
señor,
but I—”

He shakes his head. “No, you don’t.”

“But Señor Tyrone is—”

“I’m not after Jack. I’m looking for you.”

Meek. Eyes down. “For me?”

“Yeah, for you.”

“What do you mean,
señor
?” I say in Spanish.

He grins, blows a smoke ring. “No, no, don’t do that to me. I know your English is just fine. Now be like a good little puppy and take a seat over there.”

He points at a wooden deck chair. I brush off the thin layer of snow and sit. Water seeps up from the wood, through Jack’s sweatpants and against my skin.

“You weren’t in the motel,” Briggs says, leaning forward and taking the poker out of my hand.

“No.”

“Weren’t in the motel so I asked around and figured you were here.”

“Have I broken a law?” I ask.

“Well, if you were whoring here and not cutting Esteban or myself in, I’d say that you were breaking a law, but I don’t think you’re whoring, are you?”

I shake my head.

“No, María, I don’t think you’re whoring, because I don’t think you need the money.”

“I do not understand,
señor
.”

“It’s just a hunch, but something tells me you don’t need the money that badly,” he says with another grin.

The cold is making me tremble. No. It isn’t the cold. I force myself to stop it.

“If I haven’t done anything wrong, I’d like to go back inside,” I tell him.

“You’re not going anywhere until you answer me a few questions.”

“Ok.”

“‘Ok’ . . . Yeah, that’s the fucking spirit. Ok. How long have you been here? Three days. You should know the score by now. Question number one. Whose fucking town is this?”

“Your town,
señor
.”

“My town. Absolutely goddamn right. My fucking town. I’m the sheriff. I’m the representative of the republic. I’m the fucking Lord High Executioner. That’s right. We got Tom Cruise but it’s my fucking town.”

His voice has risen. His face is red.

Something’s happened. He’s found something out.

Did Paco blab about New Mexico? Have the
federales
followed our trail here? What has leaked? Calm. Keep calm. It’s ok. Remember the Havana rule: say nothing—twice.

He unbuttons his coat, places his boot on the arm of my chair, and continues. “You think something could happen here and I wouldn’t know? You’re very much mistaken,
señorita
. From Malibu Mesa to Wetback Mountain and all the way to fucking Vail, I know what’s going on. It’s my job to know. Get me?”

“Yes,
señor
.”

“The last time I existed in a state of ignorance was Gulf War One. We thought we were the invasion but we were only the diversion. No one’s played me like that since. No one and certainly not some Mex cunt who’s too fucking proud to whore for us. Why are you so fucking proud? You think you’re going to get Jackie here to marry you? You think he’s going to knock you up?
Is that your fucking plan? Or is blackmail more your game? Play both angles at the same fucking time?”

The other shining leather boot lands on my chair with a clump. He crosses his legs and those eyes bore into me.

Take it easy, I tell myself. He doesn’t know anything for sure. He’s still fishing. He’s got something but he doesn’t see everything. Yet.

“No answer?” he says.

“I don’t know what you mean,
señor
.”

“What did you hear? What rumors are they spreading in that Mex motel of yours?”

Spittle flying from his lips. Real anger in his words. And now I’m afraid. Afraid of those big hands more than the gun. Beat me to death with two blows.

Again an image of a naked body, yellow and blue, bloated, a skull for a face, maggots for eyes. That’s me there in that soft brown earth, under those big trees, unloved, unfound forever.

He pauses to get his breath back, squints at me. “Well?” he says.

I’m supposed to answer.

“But I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say truthfully.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about? I think you fucking do. I think someone has been shooting their mouth off and you’ve seen the chance for a few dollars more. A chance for the big score. Is that right? I mean, why concern yourself with blow-job money when you can shoot for millions?”

Anything I say will only provoke him.

He waits me out.

“Perhaps you could tell me what I have done wrong?”

He nods, smashes his fist into his hand, gets up, and walks behind me. I stare straight ahead. If I don’t look back the monster won’t be there. Right, Dad?

A car driving past on the road. A helicopter landing at the Cruise house.

Surely he can’t kill me out here with all these potential witnesses.

His breath against my cheek.

“You were at the Pearl Street Garage in town. Asking questions about an incident last May.”

The grave. The trees.

I’m fucked. Should have bribed Jackson.

Hector’s first rule of police work: secure your snitches. But where would I have gotten enough money on a salary of thirty dollars a month? Burned most of my savings on the coyote. And besides, Jackson told me about you, why wouldn’t he tell you about me?

And now. Fucked.

Don’t say anything. Don’t deny it, just say nothing.

Briggs takes a long breath, breathes out. Cream, coffee, tobacco. “So why does Little Miss Nobody want to know about a dead Mex? What are you, María? A blackmailer? An opportunist? An undercover journo? What’s in it for you, Señorita X?”

His gloved hands pinch a fold of skin at the back of my neck. He twists it.

Pain. Terrible pain as he lifts me off the seat.

“I could fucking paralyze you with this if I wanted to,” he says or seems to say—I can barely hear him through the fire in my nerve endings.

I try to hit his arms. My legs kick out.

“Stop it!”

“Speak, you little bitch, speak and tell me everything. Why did you go to the garage? Did Esteban put you up to this? What does he want to know?”

He squeezes so hard that I’m seeing stars, passing out . . .

One second, two, blackness.

He lets go the pinch. My head slumps forward.

He’s facing me.

“Why were you at the garage?” he whispers.

Play for time. Big breaths. Got to get out of here. Hit him with something.