Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (16 page)

His knees gave way as he climbed the narrow concrete steps. The sheriff caught his waistband and heaved him up to the landing. The three officers herded him through a peeling green door, into a dim anteroom which reeked of urine and disinfectant. Ahead was a steel door. A single brown eye peered out of a mesh-covered square the size of a memo pad.

“Zat Bollinger? How’d I know he’s okay?”

‘Tell him, Bollinger,” grunted the sheriff behind him.

“You sick sadistic sonovabitch!”

“How do you like that for gratitude? Moves outa the county jail into this nice country-club atmosphere and still he bitches. You gonna sign for him or do I take him back?”

Muttering, the attendant unlocked the door and stepped out, pulling it shut behind him. He towered three inches over Danny’s head, but his body was a shapeless mass, like warm putty crammed into a once-white uniform. Now the smock was grimy and splotched with yellow stains.

His small eyes watched with concern as Colley unlocked Dan’s manacles. Dan rubbed his wrists, glanced off to the left, and saw the sheriff tuck the signed receipt into his shirt pocket.
One prisoner, slightly used
. I’ll piss blood for a week, you filth. He saw himself move with dreamlike slowness, his arm looping wide, his fist exploding against the sheriff’s jaw like a puff of talcum powder. He felt a flare of agony in his chest, then the light faded out …

His cheek grated against slimy concrete, his eyes were fixed on a forest of moving legs. A needle bit his hip, and he felt a sudden lassitude ooze over him like cold mud. Oh when am I gonna get out of this?

It’s all right, Danny. I’ll always be here …

It seemed to Elizabeth that the entire citizenry of the United States had left the country and come to Mexico, stopping at the border only to buy gaudy shirts and straw hats, and have a yellow Sanborn sticker slapped on their windshields. And every Gringo that spent more than a week in the country seemed willing to serve as her personal guide—”take you anywhere you wanta go, baby”—so long as she paid the tab and shared her bed.

By the time she reached Mexico City, she was wishing Dan had been less vague about the location of his hideaway.
“Little town called Las Catas, on the beach north of Acapulco”
In a dimlit bar near the bus station, she had a diaquiri with a tanned, blue-eyed man in early middle-age who wore wrap-around aviator sunglasses and carried an intricately carved walking stick. “Yeah, well that particular beach happens to be several hundred miles long, and it’s got more nameless little fishing villages than a beggar’s got lice. Best thing for you is to go to Acapulco and get on a tour going north …”

He was smooth, relaxed, and spoke fluent Spanish, and while she waited in line for her bus ticket she decided he could be useful. But he had left when she returned to the bar, so she continued her solo trip.

By the time she reached Acapulco she knew she’d have to get out of the tourist stream to make contact with Danny’s people. She asked a woman at a beach restaurant
where the long-hairs hung out, and was told to try Zihua-tanejo, a few miles up the coast. It turned out to be more than a hundred; she rode the bus past endless miles of sun-warmed beaches, past Pampanoa where the big blue waves came curling in. Zihuat was beautiful, with its wide placid bay and its beaches of yellow sand and white coral. But the town was filled with plastic types, runaways and college kids dropping out for the winter, laid-off auto workers drawing compensation while they drank Corona beer and toked up on Guerrero Gold. By now she’d begun to learn the language of the subculture; she knew that family names were rarely used among hardcore heads. She didn’t know Danny’s nickname, so she asked for the Learned Doctor. It was a little like asking for Christopher Columbus; many had heard of him and a few had met him, but nobody knew where he was at the moment. She rented a hotel room and took up beachcombing. As she was eating lunch one afternoon on an isolated spit of white coral, a pair of bearded surfers came out of the jungle and told her they had heard, yeah, that she sought the whereabouts of one who called himself the Learned Doctor, who lived in a place called Las Catas. This was indeed true, but—

“You can’t get there from here, right? Okay, here’s what you do. Take a plane to Melchor Ocampo, then get a bus to Playa Azul. From there you might hitch a ride on the beer truck that runs up the coast. Otherwise you got a two-day shuffle up the beach.”

Though they smoked the omnipresent
Mota
, they seemed like friendly young men, albeit rough mannered and limited in vocabulary. They warned her not to sleep in the coconut groves, since these were regularly patrolled by armed men with an instinct for criminal assault. Also she shouldn’t be surprised if the natives acted hostile, as the costal jungles were speckled with poppy fields and pot plantations. Dope was a local cottage industry, with the
niños
picking the tops, the women bagging, the men hauling and dealing. Federal troops policed the larger
towns, but the only law in the bush was the gun and the machete.

Then as if to prove what they said, while she was taking a swim in the lagoon, they rifled her backpack and dissolved into the jungle with her passport, a packet of traveler’s checks, her combination coin-purse with key pouch, and the tape of her interview with Dan. No doubt they thought it was music. When she gave their description to the Teniente at the barracks, he lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “I do what I can do, but the cheques can be how you say, replaced, no? You have lost,
a lo más
, a few coins, and my men could lose days, beating the bush …” Spreading his hands palm up, he smiled up into her face. “We work for so sma’ pay, you unnastand?”

She left her forwarding address and chartered a fourseater Bonanza to the river town of Melchor Ocampo. She resented the five-hundred pesos it cost now that her cash reserve had been wiped out, but could find no other way to get there. In Melchor they told her the once-a-day bus to Playa Azul had already left. She was eating a rosbif
torta
in the banyan-shaded plaza when a huge black-bearded man rode up on a black Honda, wearing faded black dungarees and a black leather vest. His bloated belly was marked with three terrible bullet scars. He offered to take her, not only to Playa Azul, but onward, even as far as Las Catas, which was as far north as you could go and still have gas to return.

She had misgivings, particularly when he fired up a joint the moment they left the village. The harsh sweet smoke drifted up her nose as they bounced along the pot-holed blacktop which arrowed across the swampy jungle. She was faintly nauseous by the time they reached Playa, a village of squalid concrete huts spread out behind a sandbar. Off to the south, she could see the terraced balconies of a luxury hotel, but the biker turned north, where the beach extended to the hazy distance in an endless scallop of crescent dunes.

The Frog—as he had introduced himself—enjoyed it immensely, whooping as his bike soared over the cusp of
one dune, wallowed, fishtailing, in the basin of another, then swooped up again. Liza’s stomach threatened to give up its burden. The hot exhaust scorched the inside of her calves, her thighs stuck to the outside of his legs, gritty with sand. Hot gusts of wind blew off the coconut plantations, which stretched like karnak pillars to the gray-green hills twenty miles inland.

About noon he swung off the wave-packed sand and churned over a high dune, stopping at a little lagoon covered with water hyacinth. He dipped his hands in the water and slurped, then looked up at her and grinned. “Hey, swimtime, right?”

He whipped off his vest and shucked down his pants, made a whooping pancake dive onto the matted hyacinth. She felt unbearably gritty and slimy, but didn’t want to join him, wallowing and snorting like a hippo, so she walked twenty yards down the shore and waded in without taking off her denim shorts and shirt. She enjoyed the refreshing coolness, though the slimy tendrils of hyacinth roots tickled her skin and made her uneasy.

While she dried herself in the sun, he spread a greasy tarpaulin in the shade of a palm, opened a can of sardines and a box of crackers. Her stomach had begun to swish and gurgle like a laundry in the rinse (she remembered the ripe, rancid smell of the
torta
she’d eaten in Melchor) so she sat and looked attentive while he chewed his fish and crackers and told tales of personal valor: “… This dude in heavy leather … rode a 600 Suzuki, Jesus, that bitch was hot. He was holding a blade, only I didn’t see it until …” And his narrow escapes from death: “… On a run down to Oaxaca when the front rubber blew. It was like a slow-motion flick; I floated along about two feet above the pavement, spinnin’ like a frisbee …”

After eating, he rolled onto his back, lit a joint, belched, and looked up through the leaves. “Let’s have a little fuck before we hit the road, hey Liza?”

She would’ve laughed, if it hadn’t been for her incipient
nausea. And a saddle-sore had begun to throb on her left buttock. “I think I prefer to get where I’m going.”

He turned his head and squinted up at her. “What if you ain’t gonna get where you’re going, unless?”

She felt no fear of him, but the scene disgusted her. She pulled her wallet out of her pack and dug out a hundred-peso note. He looked at it and sneered. “Whaddaya think I’m runnin’? A fucking beach taxi? Shit.” He snatched the bill and stuffed it in his pocket. “That pays for the ride to here.” He closed his left eye and grinned. “Dig?”

She nodded, picked up her pack, slung it over her shoulder, and trudged up the dune. Her feet sank to the ankles in the loose sand; it was so hot it scalded her skin. She found it best to shuffle along and kick the hot surface layer ahead of her. Reaching the beach, she pulled off her thongs and walked in the cool surf. She heard his engine roar into life behind the dune. It sputtered, popped and crackled, but came no closer. She climbed to the crest and saw him astride the bike, sunk to the hubs in the loose sand. He waved and made a pushing motion with his hands.

“Dig,” she said, and laughing to herself, turned and walked on.

The night was hideous for her. At sunset she scooped a hole in the sand above the surfline and managed not to vomit as she sipped the gritty slime that seeped into the basin. She tried to sleep on the sand, but darkness brought fear and trembling; strange shapes emerged from the sea and humped toward the land; unseen creatures snorted and snuffled at the edge of the jungle. She gave up finally and started walking again. Only when the sun came up behind her did she feel secure enough to climb an outcropping of rock, build a nest of dry grass, spread out her bag, and sleep.

The sun was halfway up the eastern sky when she woke up. She smoked a cigarette and watched the waves break on the beach below. Two horns of slate-colored rock
jutted out into the sea; between them a line of surf stitched across the gap like the raveled string on a bow. Out beyond the breakers, the sea mounded up into towering concave shields, higher, it seemed, than the point of rock on which she sat. An offshore wind caught the white-scalloped edges and whipped them back in smokelike streamers. The leading edges curled, collapsed, and tumbled down in foaming froth. A lone surfer skittered up and down the shining green-glass wall.

She looked across the fringed crowns of the coconut palms which covered the coastal flat. She could see the peaked thatched roofs of a dozen huts strung out along the edge of a hundred-foot cliff. A tall chimney of rock had come unstuck from the main
massif
, and seemed to be tipping into the surf which frothed like a lacy petticoat around its base. On its top stood a shack which appeared to have once been large and well built. One end of the roof had collapsed, a wall had crumpled, and the whole structure seemed to be drawing back, trying to avoid its inevitable collapse into the sea. A palm log had been laid across the chasm, connecting the rock to the rest of the cliff. She couldn’t help thinking what audacity it showed, to build there in defiance of wind and gravity …

She felt reluctant to start moving again, though she was hungry and thirsty, and the village was the only possible source of food and drink. Her ears had grown accustomed to silence, and the thought of coarse human voices abrading her eardrums was unpleasant. She felt relaxed, at ease, alone. She was beginning to realize how many hundreds of little adjustments she’d made in order to live in society. Even to approach the village would involve putting her face into the shape of a smile to indicate that she was not hostile, but desired to be friendly, only not too friendly. (Mexican men always had trouble grasping this.) Of course she could simply open her wallet and let money speak for her, as did most members of the tribe
Turisticus A mericus
—but she was nearly broke, so that form of communication was limited.

Back to the old tried-and-true
. She took out her compact and looked into the dusty round mirror. Mottled patches of dead epidermis covered her cheeks and forehead; beneath it glowed the angry red of a new sunburn. Her lips were swollen and cracked; her legs, protruding from frayed denim shorts, were pebbled with sand-flea bites and marked by a tic-tac-toe of fingernail scratches. Her denim shirt, open to the second button, revealed a wedge of blistered, burnt-sienna skin.

She tightened up inside as footsteps crashed out of the thorny scrub behind her. Tilting her mirror slightly, she glimpsed a stubbled face—then the man turned his back and began unrolling a straw mat, twenty feet up the slope from her nesting place. He looked harmless: streaks of gray lined his shaggy dark-blonde hair, his ribs radiated out from his spine like those of a starving dog. A tinge of pain suffused his bronze skin, as if he’s just returned to the tropics after a brief absence. She marked him down tentatively as a butterfly collector or a bird watcher …

She closed her compact and looked out across the bay, trying to ignore him, but unable to lose the prickly feeling that his presence had something to do with her. She felt like part of the local fauna being scrutinized by a zoologist. She turned slightly, saw him bend his head and begin rolling a cigarette.
One of those
, she thought. She turned away, heard him get up and walked up behind her, heard the sound as he scraped a match across a box. She smelled the acrid smoke, felt the touch of his finger on her shoulder, glanced over and saw the twisted tube, shook her head. He sat down beside her, crossed his ankles, and laid his walking stick across his lap.

Walking stick
. Her eyes trailed up the spiraling darkwood shaft, penetrated the dark-blonde fuzz on his jaws, met the blue eyes which glittered with secret amusement. Recognition came slowly; she recalled the dim smoky bar in Mexico City, the cold tartness of a diaquiri …

“You!” She sucked in her breath. “What are
you
doing here?”

He chuckled softly. “Would you believe I just happened to be passing by?”

“Not for one second. Who are you?”

“I am a thirty-eight year old male of American origin, in reasonably good health, though presently rather stoned, whom you can see sitting beside you. Would
my
name tell you any more?”

“Look—can we have a moritorium on games?”

“Okay, I’m Tom.”

“Tom …?” She caught her breath. “The Learned Doctor?”

“Uh-huh. You win another free diaquiri.”

She turned her head quickly away, not wanting him to see her look of relief. Here at last was the true, the real spore of Dan Bollinger. It was a little like meeting someone from her hometown; she felt a sense of intimacy mingled with distrust, not knowing what demands he would make on her. She looked at him again, and felt a prickle of resentment.