Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

About four hundred years back, Spaniards came to seize Queretaro. The Otomis there saw the fiery guns and horses and figured they couldn’t whip that arsenal. So they challenged the Spaniards to a fistfight. The macho Spaniard captain decided to punch it out first and shoot later, if they lost. So the two armies duked up and down the hills, until after a day or so, when thousands of men lay beat up and delirious, a vision of Saint James appeared in the sky, and gave a TKO to the Spaniards.

The stoic Otomis went and got some sleep. Later, the ones who didn’t like having Spanish patrones hiked south to make their home in the Mesquital, a desert so harsh nobody would fight for it.

Now a band of Otomis lived in the shantytown. They were small folk with delicate features, watchful eyes, sad, dark, brooding faces. Back home they were the tenders of the maguey plant, from where you get tequila, mescal, and pulque. They used to drink a lot of pulque but here all they had was the stinking river water, and their food was garbage the cook at a restaurant saved for them, and tortillas they cooked over a fire on an old fender. They were ready to go home to the Mesquital, but two thousand miles was a dreadful walk. They’d ridden up here on a bus, eleven men and four new wives, because a couple months after Pearl Harbor a guy came and told them there were plenty of jobs in Tijuana, serving the great city of San Diego, which had boomed on account of the big war. This fellow got paid to spread the word, so more folks would come begging for work and keep wages down, like the Okies used to up north.

Only one Otomi knew a few words of English. Most knew a little Spanish. Hickey gathered them around in the shade of their homes made of cardboard and two Plymouths. Then he had to go meet Leo. Tito stayed as the recruiter.

Since it was too late to drive back over the mesa, he crossed the river on a stone bridge and walked fast toward the gate, his eyes panning around, looking for cops or strange cars.

He didn’t know any of the gate guards. But as he neared the walk-through gate, the MP, a lanky, freckled boy, got big-eyed and grabbed his revolver. Hickey said, “Hey, I’m gonna call the colonel and turn myself in.” He kept walking, through the gate and fast toward a block past the office where Leo’s Packard waited at the curb outside Sally’s Café. The MP followed. So Hickey whipped around, pointed a finger south, and snapped, “Get back to your post, fella.”

The boy stepped closer, his gun raised, and gaped his mouth to shout for help. Hickey moved in closer, thinking he might dodge left and smack the gun hand right and then gut-punch the kid. But Leo got there first.

He came puffing, running from the north, and flashed the L.A. badge he still carried, his souvenir. “Weiss. San Diego PD. Thanks.”

He rushed Hickey off before the kid could find his wits. They hustled over to the Packard, jumped in, and sped out of there.

“You got bored, needed some excitement, so you tried the gate?”

“Yep,” Hickey said. “Smythe treat you right?”

“Hell, Smythe ever treat anybody right?”

“For a price.”

“He got us the grenades and a couple cases of ratty Springfields, look like they had to fight their way outa Russia. I got ’em in the trunk. Tom, this’d be a good time to quit, before we get caught with an arsenal and shot for being conspirators or something.”

“I found Tito,” Hickey said. “Turn here.”

Leo wheeled right and grinned. “Swell news.” Then soberly he asked, “Which ones got it?”

“Turn up that dirt road. The twins.”

Leo gave a sigh and fell quiet. As they crawled in low up the dirt trail, the differential and muffler kept bottoming out. The high sun broiled the mesa and colored it reddish with heat waves, and the wind blew steadily, crackling, moaning through the arroyos.

Hickey sat braced against the dash and ground his teeth. It seemed they’d crash on a rut and land too hard, blow up, or suddenly get bushwhacked by Marines. Mexican soldiers. A company of Nazis. No telling who might be after them. The craziest dangers felt real when the Santa Ana blew.

But Leo kept to the least rutted trails, creeping in low gear, and they didn’t spot another soul until they crawled off the mesa and neared the river. They reached the shantytown about 2
p.m.
By then Tito had recruited five Otomis, sent out a guy to round up a few cars, another to scout the Casa de Oro and draw them a map of Las Lomas.

Hickey and Leo got a crate of old Springfield .30-caliber rifles out of the Packard and called the Otomis over. First Hickey showed them how to load the rifles. The sad-faced Otomis held the guns reverently as if they’d belonged to a saint. Then Hickey ushered them into the Jeep. Leaving Leo behind to deal with some English-speaking Kickapoos Tito had found, they cut along the river to the creek trail, up the side of Otay mesa, then a few miles southwest to a place Tito knew where Cárdenas’ army used to train, so if people heard the shots they might not suspect anything. In the Jeep, the Otomis sat still at first, frightened, holding tight and yelping every time they crossed a rut or tipped a little along the sandy bank. But soon they chattered and hung loose as monkeys, leaning out over the sides.

They stopped near a grove of wild olive trees. Hickey tore a spare shirt he’d brought along, clipped a piece of it to a tree with some loose bark, then called the Otomis to line up. He gave Tito some rules, and the cabbie translated, barked them out—they had to stay together, not even wander off to piss without asking, and swear to follow orders no matter what. They picked a sergeant, a young guy named Guillermo, with an egg shaped nose and pointed teeth, the only one who wanted the job. Finally Hickey showed them how to aim the Springfield and hold it right, how to snap on the bayonets, how to fire.

They blasted away gleefully until the last shreds of Hickey’s shirt wafted toward the sea.

Checking them out on the Springfields took until late afternoon. Then they drove back across the mesa, with the Otomis sitting taller as they held the guns in both hands and didn’t look quite so sad as before.

At the shantytown, Leo and the Kickapoos were gathered on the riverbank, eating. The Kickapoos were small, wiry, wore their hair in single braids. Their smiles were quicker than the Otomis without giving up the fierce glint in their eyes.

The tribe had long ago got driven out of Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Texas. Finally a gang of them landed in Mexico where the government gave them territory in Cohuila, in exchange for help fighting off wild Texans. Sometimes the Kickapoos rampaged over the border, until thirty years ago they made a treaty that let them pass freely both ways as long as they’d quit pillaging—so now they could work harvests in the States and winter down in Cohuila. A week ago, these Kickapoos headed northwest, to pick carrots in the San Joaquin valley or maybe try working in a factory. They’d only stopped in TJ to check out putas.

The oldest of them was twenty-five, named Jack. He wore a baseball cap with the St. Louis Browns insignia. He wanted to hear more about the Nazis and the gold. Hickey talked, mostly the truth, except he made speculations sound more like fact—while the seven Kickapoos squatted in a half-circle in front of him. The Otomis stood behind, eyeing a leftover plate of tacos. Finally Hickey gave one of them ten dollars and sent him across the river to the coffee and taco stand. Then he and the Kickapoos squeezed into the Jeep with a pile of weapons, and drove up the creek bed toward the mesa.

The Kickapoos knew how to shoot already. In less than an hour Hickey had checked them out. He showed two of them how to use the Thompson light machine gun McColgin had carried into Hell, and instructed two others how to activate and sling grenades. Finally he sat them down in a circle and talked awhile about the gold and the dangers—how they needed to strike and get out before the Army could react, since Cárdenas had a battalion less than two miles away. “And, truth is,” he confessed, “I got no proof about the gold, only the word of a mixed-up girl and a German who’s so scared and drunk he might be seeing guys from Mars, too.”

He left the Kickapoos to pow-wow, walked to a high place and looked off the mesa, over the town to the ocean and the Islas Coronados and a hundred miles farther across the water to where it appeared the Santa Ana had blown the most glorious desert sunset out to sea. A thousand shades of rose and deep as eternity. Hickey stood there feeling mighty. Immortal. When Jack shouted, “Hey, Chief, we gonna do it,” hot shivers ran from his groin, along his spine, all the way to his skull.

Back at the shantytown they found most everybody clustered around a couple vendors who stood bent over their carts, dealing out tacos fast like cards to the ragged children and their mothers, to the bums, grandmas, thieves, the cheapest whores in town. Leo rested in the Packard’s rear seat. When Hickey came over, the old guy said, “You can feed a whole village of moochers for fifty bucks, why not? Too damned hot for ’em to go out scrounging.” Leo gazed around at the sorry crowd of Indians. “Some damn army you got, Tom. Those Nazis better look out.” He grimaced. “How about we go on home and call it a draw?”

“Naw,” Hickey said. “We got some tough boys here.”

He enlisted a swaggering Kickapoo named Renaldo to run and check out the border gate, see if an old Chinese man was there.

***

By 9
p.m.
, in Leo’s Packard, Hickey’d gotten passed through the gate by Mr. Chee and Alvarez, driven to his attorney’s place, signed real-estate papers, come away with $750 cash, and made it back to the Surf and Sand motor hotel. To visit Wendy Rose.

As they stepped out of their room and crossed the gravel toward the seawall, the red wind gusted furiously, howling around the apartment buildings and bending palms toward the sea. Their dry fronds sounded like rattlesnakes. The moon had risen. The tent city, a mile down the beach, swayed, fluttered, whole walls torn up and slashing through the air like flags. They climbed over the seawall. In front of them, beachcombers walked along the shore looking down for treasure, their hair streaking out behind them. A few small, lighted boats, fishing or dropping lobster traps past the breakers, teeter-tottered on the swells.

Wendy kept quiet. She made as if to reach for Tom’s hand and walk closer beside him, but then she held back. If she touched him—he was a man, like Pa and George, Franz and the devil’s Captains—all the men except Clifford. What men did was petted you softly at first, till the heartbeats banged in your ears, then they squeezed you and pinched and scratched and tried to tear your legs apart till you cried from how it ached and burned then they socked you and pounded you—Ma said men want you to be perfect, give them everything they want. When you don’t, they hate you. It must be the same reason they fought a war, Wendy thought. Somebody doesn’t give them everything, they hurt somebody. She wanted to ask Tom not to go to the war. Maybe—if he stayed—he could be her brother. The only man she could trust to hold her—like Clifford—and never beat her, not for anything. If Tom got killed tonight, she wouldn’t have a brother. Nobody would take her to Heaven, and the Devil would come. He would dash out of Hell and carry her back there. He would burn her and slap her, bite her skin, smear her belly with.…She walked stiffly. Her legs and arms were hard with goosebumps and frozen through. The wind had blown her eyes shut. But she didn’t cry, or yell out, or ask Tom Hickey to stay home from the war. Her ma used to say that men do what they want and only get mean when you ask for things.

“Magda’s gonna sleep with you, in case you get scared,” Hickey said. “That’s good, huh?”

“And when I wake up, you’ll be back.” She looked up at him, making it a question.

“Maybe.” He nodded and watched her eyes fluttering as if every instant they switched between wanting to see and deciding not to. Then out of his mouth came the strangest, unexpected thing. Without thinking, or knowing what all he meant, he said, “I sure love you, Wendy.”

She almost touched his face with a finger, but pulled it away and whispered, “Yes. Like my Clifford.”

Hickey watched the glow of her eyes, the quiver of life in her skin, the lips poised to speak but afraid to. He thought about Tijuana, his army, the gold, the Nazis. All that seemed madness now. Outlandish dreams like those mescal gave you.

But once you set things up, if you turn back, you’re a goner. Hickey learned that long ago. You had to do things in a certain order. First you think, then you decide, then act. If you try to do one of those when it’s time for the other, you always get tragedy. So he walked the girl back to the Surf and Sand. He said goodbye to her, to Magda and Violet. He promised Vi that Leo wouldn’t join any battles. Finally he looked over at the dresser where he’d set a letter, addressed to Elizabeth, that Vi would find when she straightened his things up if he didn’t make it back. He’d tried to write some advice but it looked silly on paper, so he just told what would’ve happened—he’d stumbled upon a good war, and gone out fighting.

On the patio, he warned Nels and McColgin to look alive. Then he walked to Mission Boulevard and climbed into the Packard, with about forty minutes to reach the border while Alvarez and Mr. Chee stood guard.

Chapter Twenty-four

At the shantytown, Hickey found Leo asleep, wedged into the backseat of Tito’s Ford. The night had fallen quiet. Now and then you heard a moan or laugh, a child’s whimper, a chorus of rasps from the crickets. Hickey sat on the riverbank, smoked, and missed Wendy. Or the man he felt like around her. A kinder fellow, less polluted by the world.

The way he saw her life, there was a child too sensitive to bear cruelty, who saw it everywhere. To escape she started dreaming herself off to better places and wouldn’t come back until she felt safe. Probably she only felt safe around Clifford. Then the Army took him away. And Hickey got him killed.

Finally he woke Leo. The old guy half-sleepwalked to his Packard and dumped himself into the driver’s seat. “It’s a nightmare, is all,” he groaned. “Tomorrow there won’t be Nazis in Tijuana.” He fired up the Packard and lurched away.

Hickey curled into the back of Tito’s Ford. The cabbie was sleeping in front. A few snores rattled out of him. Then Hickey was gone, walking a beach holding hands with somebody. Elizabeth. Wendy. He couldn’t see. His gaze was locked on the ocean where boats with loud-colored sails glided toward something big and dark, maybe a carrier, or an island. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that somebody needed him. He woke feeling strong. Anxious to move, to settle things.

By 7
a.m.
he’d bought the whole shantytown churros and coffee, and started up the mesa with the Yaquis Tito had gathered yesterday, handsome guys with squarish faces and leathery skin. All of them knew Spanish. Their sergeant was a big Yaqui named Carlos who’d lived in Phoenix two years ago. Now he’d been on his way to try to enlist in the U.S. Marines. All six Yaquis could shoot. In twenty minutes they blasted every leaf off an olive tree. Hickey drilled them to reload fast and to use the bayonets. Whooping, they charged tumbleweeds and sage.

Back at the shantytown, Hickey found Tito on the riverbank drinking coffee with Arturo, a bucktoothed man he’d sent to scout the Lomas, who said it looked like business as usual at the Casa de Oro. By 4
a.m.
, most of the ricos and whores had gone to bed, the gamblers had pulled away in their big sedans and limos, the guards snoozed.

When Arturo left to get some cars, Tito and Hickey studied the maps, talked over schedules and strategies until the Packard drove in and Leo came waddling toward them. The old man’s shoulders slumped inches and his head drooped as though he wore an iron hat.

“Metzger told one thing straight, Tom. They’re after the girl, or us. The way I make it, a gang of pachucos busted into my house about dawn, crashed windows, ransacked the place, dumped out Vi’s china closet. Later they got to our office. Looks like they had a bullfight in there. The girls are okay. I gave McColgin and his pal two Brownings.”

Hickey gazed around, at the east mesa, at the bridge, the high roads that led to Revolución. Anyplace up there, a guy could be watching through a sight, planning an execution or a massacre.

“There’s more, Tom. I finally got through to Finnegan, in the flesh. I told him from word one. Even how we snatched Wendy outa Hell, except I blamed it on some anonymous guys. All right, Finnegan says, not to worry, it’s all sewed up tight, he says, account of Lázaro Cárdenas won’t stand for monkey business, and he’s got Baja under his thumb. Not a cork gets popped down here without Cárdenas hears about it. In other words, Finnegan says thanks for the dope, but we got our own problems.”

Hickey squatted like an Indian and muttered, “What’s it mean?”

“I figure, if Cárdenas has got things that tight, not only’s he gonna smash you, but most of the gold won’t be at the Casa, because del Monte’s the wrong man. Cárdenas must be the Presidente the girl talked about. See, Tom, it all clicks, once you allow Cárdenas is a crook. Could be he outlawed the Agua Caliente Casino just so he could steal the gold. You thought about that?”

“Yeah,” Hickey said. “I don’t buy it. Cárdenas might be on the take. But he’s not the Presidente. Because if he is, I only got a few hours to live.” He motioned toward the huts and the river. “Same as a lot of these guys.”

“Unless we scat outa here, pronto.”

“Naw. Too late.” Hickey stood, laid a hand on Leo’s shoulder, and started walking toward a Kickapoo hut where he could borrow some shade. But Leo called him back and handed him a letter. From Elizabeth. He stared at the envelope a minute, and then folded and pocketed it. She hadn’t written in weeks, and the letter would disturb him, take his mind off business. He walked to the shade and squatted there, thinking how the fortune in gold was Wendy’s story. And people called her a moron. Besides her, he was trusting Juan Metzger, who might lie for a dozen reasons. To set them up for the kill. So Hickey’d sneak the Metzger clan across the line, like he’d done. It could be what scared Metzger wasn’t the Germans but what Hickey might do in revenge.

Hickey imagined Indians running down a hill toward the sea, smacked with bullets, blasted apart with grenades. It took him half an hour to discharge those visions.

By then he was back on the mesa teaching the Browning machine gun to Carlos the Yaqui and Kickapoo Jack, and two other Kickapoos, the biggest ones, swaggering Renaldo and Desmond who wore thick glasses. He gave a lesson, then stepped back to watch them practice. The noise rattled his head. His mind drifted. It didn’t take long to find Wendy.

He saw her laughing, jumping over tiny waves, in a pretty red bathing suit with a ruffled tutu skirt. Her skin glowed white as the sun. She turned and saw him, and ran across the beach with one arm out, vibrant with joy, enough to warm a ghoul’s heart. He went to the Jeep for his thermos, shot down a jolt of café con leche, gazed back over his troops, and got a warm feeling about this ragged army of his—like a band of peasants during the Crusades. A smile possessed him. He admired these Indians. They were brave or else they wouldn’t go this far from home. And desperate for loot. One share, say a hundredth of the gold, and maybe an Indian could set up his family with a few hectares of land or a small business, break into capitalism—maybe they’d do better than he’d done. These fellows had plenty to win, damned little to lose, so he figured they wouldn’t run from the heat, and they’d follow orders for fear of getting him mad. Surely they knew that when a white guy got mad at Indians, he gypped them out of their money, at least.

Besides, some of these Indians had ancestors who cooked their enemies, fed them to lions. And the ones who’d been Christianized, their churches were lavished with pictures of bloody Jesus hung on a tree, saints being mangled, witches and heretics burning. Maybe he should translate Nazis as heretics and make this into a holy war. Hickey’d read a few books about the Mexican revolution, enough to know that once these peaceful Indians rose to vengeance they might cut the heart out of every rich guy and German in Las Lomas.

Hickey left the Indians on the mesa, drove back to the shantytown to meet Tito’s friends and deal for a taxi and three other cars. They bargained until Hickey’d bought the Fords for fifty dollars each, the Studebaker for seventy-five, and traded a couple Springfields for the taxi. When the dealing finished, Leo walked Hickey down by the river, and on the way he muttered, “I might go with you, Tom.”

“Forget it.”

“Naw, I could use another shot at those Nazis. All this making ready’s got my blood stirred, my heart slam-banging. If I just sit around and worry the damn thing’s gonna blow. Anyway, I figure, who wants to die like some old farmer, slow and with plenty of time to stew about what I oughta done. I been around. Magda’s almost grown. Today, I got no beef with saying adiós, long as I’m not screaming loud as Franz Metzger did. He was looking into Hell, Tom.”

Hickey’s throat locked. Weakly he said, “You gotta stay out of it, just in case. Somebody’s gotta take care of the girls. Both of ’em.” His eyes drifted off to the hills. Finally he lay a hand on Leo’s shoulder, mumbled, “Thanks anyway,” and turned back to the Jeep.

By the time Hickey drove to the mesa, picked up the Indians, and got back to the shantytown, as the sun dipped behind the west mesa and the low sky flashed red and gold, Leo had ordered dinner for a few hundred. He sat in his Packard with the door open, paying cart vendors for tacos, coffee, sodas. When they left him alone he counted money, to keep busy so as not to get spooked when the wind climbed to a howl. Or when the Indians stared too long and made him feel like a freak show. Or else he got to worrying that these half-assed troops would desert and steal the guns, directly after suppertime.

Hickey and Tito went to the Olmec jacal where El Mofeto still lay on his side, facing the wall, on the straw mat left of the door. With his wrists tied and wrapped behind his head and his legs still bound at the ankles, it looked like all his muscles had shrunk and drawn him up small as a mummy. His hands looked dark purple. Tito kicked him in the back and waited a minute for the body to stir, before he rolled the skunk over.

Where they expected a face writhing in misery, a weird, gleeful countenance appeared. The mouth spread wide in amazement as if he’d just seen a great spectacle. Then he started laughing and muttering, loud, fast.

Finally Tito said, “He don’t tell us nothing, boss.
Puro loco
. He don’t hurt nobody, no more.”

Hickey stepped outside, got a beer from a soda vendor and slugged it down, went and found a taco and tried to eat but couldn’t stuff it down. He got one more beer, sat on the riverbank while dark fell. The air remained summer hot, only harsher, drier, charged with brutal energy. If you listened close, the wind grew louder and wilder until it was all you could hear.

Then from four miles northwest at Ream Field, the air raid siren blew. Everybody in the shantytown turned that way and froze still. The siren quit. Blew again. And stopped. So it was only a red alert. There could be a sky full of Japs speeding this way and a brigade of Nazis sneaking up the coast toward the border, but probably it was only a night of spooks like they’d gone through before, every full moon since Pearl Harbor.

If you’d been a cop in this part of the world, you expected the worst on those rare nights when the full moon met the Santa Ana. One time, a whole squad got bushwhacked in Chinatown. The cops had gone there on a riot call. A grocery and restaurant had got looted, but all the cops found were hecklers they chased into a park, grass and shrubs around a Buddhist shrine. Guns blazed. Eight guys died, only two of them Chinese. Another hot, windy full moon, some looney torched a movie house. Thirty folks got trampled. Morticians grew rich on nights like this. It was a natural law.

From his pocket, Hickey grabbed Elizabeth’s letter. It was only two pages long. She missed him. She’d gone to a dance at the country club Mr. Castillo had joined, and met a boy named Marshall Green, a golf champ who drove a British touring car. Next year he’d be a naval officer. She wrote, “I still want to visit you this summer, but Mom says where would I stay since you live in the barracks, and I’d probably get bored while you’re at work all the time. I’d go mad thinking of Marshall dancing with other girls. Maybe you can take a leave and visit me.” Her mom was happy, Elizabeth claimed. They both liked New Jersey now that winter had passed. She closed with love.

Hickey stuffed the letter into his pocket. Then he ripped it out again, wadded it tight, and threw in into the stinking river.