Six Bad Things (2 page)

You think about the pack of smokes sitting on the little table on your porch at home. Down the phone lines, the bong rips again, and you know this story isn’t getting any shorter.

—This dingleberry, he lives in the place, but you can tell by the way the bartender doesn’t give him the nod and the way the boozehounds turn their stools away from him a little that they all wish he would fucking move out. Right now he can’t believe his luck, a new fucking face in this place he can chew the ear off of. He starts right in with,
Hey my name’s so and so and I do such and such and ain’t it hotter than a bitch out there and this bartender he can’t make a good margarita to save his life and here’s the secret to a good margarita.
And the questions.
What’s your name anyway? Ain’t seen you here before, you from around here? You never been here before, you don’t know about this place? Everybody knows about this place, how can you be from around here and not know about the old M Bar, the old Murder Bar?

You stop worrying about the cigarettes.

—Yeah, the dingleberry calls the place the Murder Bar. It’s that place, you know the one. They had it closed for a couple years? Well, now it’s open again. So he tells this story about the place, how it’s not really named the Murder Bar or even the M Bar, that’s just what people from the neighborhood, people in the know, call it ’cause they were living here when it happened. He tells you,
Feel around under the ledge of the bar, the wood there, you can feel the holes that are still there from when they shot the place up and killed all those people in here.
And he’s right, the holes are there. They sanded them down so you don’t get any splinters, but the holes are there, man.

You hear the guy on the phone take a quick drink of something and you know exactly what it is. You can almost smell it, the warm bite of Tullamore Dew.

—Now the dingleberry starts telling you about it, how a guy that used to work in this place, when it was the bar before this one, got in some kind of money trouble or something and came in the place one night to rob his own boss and he went haywire and ended up blowing away everybody in the place, like twenty people in cold blood. How it didn’t end there and how you
must
have heard this story, how the guy went on a killing spree all over the city. God knows how many people he killed, including some cops. And then this psycho, this murder machine, this maddog, how he just plain disappeared. FBI put him on the Most Wanted list for awhile, but he got bumped for some bigger names, Middle Eastern names. Cops got bigger fish to fry in the City these days. So, the thing is, no big deal right? It’s just a story and people tell stories all the time especially about the kind of shit that went down in that bar, regardless of how this dingleberry may have the facts all fucked up. This ain’t the first and it won’t be the last time you hear a version of this story. Except now, he gets all intimate with you, leans in close, ’cause he’s got the
real skinny,
he says. Tells you,
This guy, who did all this killing, he didn’t have money trouble, well he did, but the money trouble he had was how many people would he have to kill to get this big sack of cash that all these people were after.
Tells you,
There was this bag of cash and the killer was looking for it and some black street gang from the Bronx called the Cowboys and a whole precinct of dirty cops and the Tong, and the Russian Mafia and even this semipro professional wrestler called the Samoan Tower.

You think about things. A gun going off in a Chinese kid’s mouth. A big Samoan in the middle of a café, blood gushing out of his left temple. A cop on his back in the rain, waiting for you to finish him. The brothers who beat your woman to death, ripped open by your bullets.

—And the maddog is the one who came out on top, took all that money, like twenty million easy, and slipped off to someplace warm,
south of the border, Mexico way. Out of sight. But that kind of cash?
The guy says,
That kind of cash, that’s like treasure and people want to hunt for it. And they do. Like
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,
if Sam Peckinpah directed it. People go hunting for this maddog and his loot. All. The. Time.

You think about being hunted. What that feels like. You think about going through it again, and curse yourself for forgetting the damn cigarettes.

—Anyway, that bit about the money and Mexico and the treasure hunters is a coda to this particular story that you have never heard before, which is why you are hearing this story right now from me.

And that is how things start to get fucked up again. That and the backpacker with the Russian accent.

THE BUCKET is right on the beach. It’s a small place, a thatched palm roof over a bar, no walls. Stools don’t work on the beach, so eight rope swings hang from the beams, and sets of white plastic tables and chairs are on the sand. There’s no electricity. Pedro hauls bags of ice down here every morning on his tricycle and dumps them into corrugated tubs full of bottles of Sol and Negro Modelo. If you order a cocktail, you get the same ice the beer sits in. If you want to eat, Pedro has a barbeque he made by sawing a fifty-five-gallon drum in half. You can get ribs, chicken, a burger, or whatever the fishermen happen to bring around that day. Every now and then Pedro’s wife will come down with her
comal,
make fresh tortillas, and we get tacos.

I’m at The Bucket around nine, after my morning swim. Pedro gets the coffeepot off the barbeque grill, pours me a cup and drops yesterday’s
Miami Herald
in front of me. His wife gets the paper every day when she goes in town for the shopping or to pick up the kids from school. Pedro brings it to me here the next day. I glance at the sports page. Dolphins this, Dolphins that.

Pedro has chorizo on the grill and a frying pan heating up. He cracks a couple eggs into the pan, gets a plastic container of salsa from the cooler bag on his tricycle, and stirs some in, scrambling the eggs. He takes a key from his belt, unlocks the enameled steel cabinet beneath the bar, grabs the bottles of booze, and starts to set them out. I walk around to the grill, give the eggs a few more stirs, and dump them onto a plastic plate. The chorizos are blackened, fat spitting from the cracks in their skin. I spear them, stick them on the plate next to the eggs, and sit back down on my swing at the bar. Pedro brings me a folded towel and sets it next to the plate. I open it up and peel off one of the still warm tortillas his wife made at home this morning. I stuff a chorizo into the tortilla, pack some of the eggs around it, fold the thing up, take a bite, and sear the inside of my mouth just like I do every morning. It’s worth it.

Pedro is about my age, thirty-five. He looks a little older because he’s spent his whole life on the Yucatán. His face is a dark, sun-wrinkled plate. He’s short and round, has a little pencil moustache, and wears heavy black plastic glasses like the ones American soldiers get for free.

He tops off my coffee.

—Go fish today?

I look out at the flat, crystal blue water. Up in town the tourists will be loading into the boats, heading for the reef to go diving or to the deep water to fish. The local fishermen here have already gone out and Pedro’s boat is the only one still in, anchored to the shore by long yellow ropes tied to lengths of rebar driven into the sand. I could fish, take the boat out by myself or wait for Pedro’s brother to show up and go out with him for an evening fish. If he doesn’t have a job tonight.

—Not today.

—Nice day for fishing.

—Too nice. I might catch a fish. And then what? Have to bring it in, clean it, cook it.

No, no fishing today.

—Game on later?

—Every Sunday, Pedro. There’s a game every Sunday except for the bye week.

—Who today?

—The Patriots.

—New England.

—Right.

—Fucking Pats.

—You’re learning.

I MET Pedro up in town a few years back when I first came to Mexico. I came to Mexico hot. Running. I walked out of the Cancún airport, got into a cab, and told the guy I wanted to get out of Cancún, down the coast somewhere. Someplace smaller. He took me about an hour down the road to a little vacation town. Small hotels along a nice strip of beach. It was OK for a while. The tourists were mostly mainland Mexicans, South Americans, or Europeans. Not many North Americans at all. Then they started building this giant resort community on the south end of town and that was it for me.

I found this spot: driving distance to town, a handful of locals with vacation
palapas,
some expatriates living in bungalows, some backpackers and day-trippers looking for a secluded beach. But no bar. Pedro was working in the place I spent most of my time in. I knew he wanted his own business and he knew I wanted a place to hang out. We made a deal.

I’m a silent partner. I pay my tab like any customer and nobody knows I backed Pedro to open the place. I gave him half the bar for moving here to run it; he’s working off the other half. Shit, I could have given him the whole thing outright. I got the money. God knows I got the fucking money.

THE DAY-TRIPPERS are starting to drift onto the beach. They hear about it in town or read about it in
Lonely Planet
and come looking for unspoiled Mexico, but they’re usually pretty damn happy they can get a cold beer and a cheeseburger. The expats will come around in the evening when they get back from fishing trips or working in town. The locals mostly show up on Friday and Saturday evening to drink. Me, I drink soda water all day, haven’t had a real drink in over two years. It’s the healthy life for me now. I take another sip of coffee, light the first cigarette of the day, and get back to the sports page.

The Dolphins have a problem. Their problem is a head coach who happens to be an idiot. I have a problem. My problem is the Miami fucking Dolphins of the National fucking Football League. When I got down here, I found out I couldn’t give up sports. I tried to get into
fútbol,
but it just didn’t click. A basketball season is like a basketball game, only the last two minutes count. And, unless I was ready to watch bullfights, that left football. Baseball? Yeah, I like baseball. I would have liked to have spent the last three years watching, listening to, and reading about baseball just like I did the thirty-two years before them, but that’s one of the things I had to give up. I got into football because I always hated football and nobody looking for me is gonna look for a guy who likes football. It makes it harder for people to find me and kill me.

And you know what? After three years of watching football, I hate it more than ever. But I hate the Dolphins’ idiot head coach more than anything else, because I am a sucker who has developed a bad habit of
caring
about the Dolphins.

Fuck me.

A classic warm-climate team, the Fins always start fast and collapse come the winter. All reason and all past history indicate that the Fins should be sliding. But they are not. Their new rookie running back, Miles Taylor, is shattering first-year records left and right and, despite his gutless teammates and inept coach, he has them winning consistently.

I am not deceived. In the AFC West, Oakland, San Diego, and Denver have been playing out of their heads and all look play-off bound. Miami will need to edge past the New York Jets if they want to get to the post season. Right now, despite the teams’ identical 9–3 records, the Fins are in first because they beat NY in an early season matchup at Miami. But even if they keep that lead for the next three games, it will be at risk on the last day of the season when Miami travels to New York for the finale.

Even my limited experience has taught me that you can always depend on Miami to do one thing: lose on the road against a division rival in December. Bet on it. So I will enjoy the wins they have now and not count on getting any more. Maybe if they miss the play-offs their coach will finally be fired. One can hope.

By noon there’s about twenty people spread along the half mile of beach and three more sitting at the bar with me. Pedro takes the radio from beneath the bar, clicks it on, and twirls the dial till the fuzzy sounds of WQAM Miami come through. He extends the antenna, alligator clips one end of a wire to it, clips the other end to the sheet of chicken wire that covers the palm roof. Suddenly the signal jumps in loud and clear.

I sit at the bar, sip seltzer and smoke, and listen to the game. Some pretty Spanish girls in bikinis stop at the bar to buy some beers. One of them smiles at me and I smile back. She asks me for one of my cigarettes and I slide her the pack. I watch as she and her friends walk off down the beach, and she glances back at me and smiles again. I wave. I like pretty girls.

The game drones on predictably. The Fins jump out early with three unanswered touchdowns, stand around while the Pats cut into their lead just before the half, and then come out flat for the third quarter. By the start of the fourth quarter, they’re hanging on to a three-point lead and the coach is calling plays as if they were still up by twenty-one.

A shaggy backpacker wanders up the beach and over to the bar. He shrugs out of his pack and takes a seat on the swing next to mine. Pedro is poking at some ribs on the grill. The guy is sitting backwards on the swing with his elbows on the bar, looking at the ocean. He glances over his shoulder at the radio. The Pats have just pinned the Fins on their own two-yard line. He looks at me and nods his head.

—Football.

Nothing odd about that, a perfectly reasonable observation. Except that he says it in a Russian accent, which is not something we get a lot of around here. Me, I take it in stride, just spit-take my seltzer all over the bar. I’m smooth like that. The guy slaps me on the back while I choke.

—OK?

I nod and wave my hand.

—Fine. Choke. Fine.

I point at the radio.

—Fucking Dolphins.

He shrugs.

—American football. Too slow.

The Fins try to run up the gut three times, get one yard, and punt miserably to their own thirty-five. Pedro comes over and the guy orders a shot of tequila and a Modelo.