across her front.
Now she’d step from those drawers next — panties was too modest a word for a garment of such magnitude — and a part of him was disgusted and debased, while at the same time another part, recovering, became entranced. She knelt to divest herself of the drawers, pivoting to deposit the huge filmy things on the table under the Day-Glo Virgin, and turned to face him, her bush a blot of darkness that seemed to separate her bulging belly from her thunderous thighs, without which the whole mass would collapse upon itself.
Yet the very peculiarity of the image — a huge Mexican prostitute standing above his pale gringo body, ribsy and stark — commandeered his imagination. The contrasts were vast and enticing: her hugeness, his frailty; his reluctance, her greed; her expertise, his clumsiness; his repression, her earthiness. His penis picked itself up in salute to the intensity of the moment.
“The mouth,” he commanded hoarsely.
She knelt, obedient to his wishes.
Speight waited out back, beyond the sewer, in the yard of the shop called Argentina. He could smell the sewer, the suffocatingly dense odor of human waste, and hear water trickling through it. It was quiet here in the junky, walled yard but beyond, on the street, he could see whores prowling in the pools of light from the intermittent overhead lamps. The old fieldman in him looked for escape routes, just in case; but there were no escape routes, no real ones. Sure, he could hit the wall if things turned ugly, but at his age there was no way he’d scale ten feet of brick if somebody was shooting at him. So it was a simple, no-option proposition: he was lucky or he was not lucky.
He knew he should have briefed the boy — what was his name? It escaped him for just a moment: Trewitt, Trewitt. But Speight never knew what to say to such youngsters — there were so many of them these days, and he knew they thought him an old fart, long out of it, a relic, an antique. And what could the boy have done anyway? Covered him? With what? No, he would have complained and groused and second-guessed. Trewitt filled Speight with depression. If he was the future, the future was bleak. Speight didn’t think Trewitt would work out.
He glanced at his watch. Oscar Meza had said fifteen minutes and twenty had passed. Speight coughed nervously, picked some scum off his lips, and wished they’d get there.
Five hundred dollars.
That’s what it would cost for a chat with Reynoldo Ramirez, a chat with a dead man.
Oscar Meza, proprietor of Oscar’s, formerly El Palacio, had wanted a thousand. Speight had thought more in terms of $300. Five hundred was all right, though he knew he’d have a tough time sailing it by Yost Ver Steeg if he didn’t come up with something nice and solid. In the old days there was always enough money. You wanted it, you got it. No questions asked. In those days the outfit went full-out, first-class. Now, nickels and dimes and young smart kids who thought you belonged in a museum or a paperback novel. He knew he thought too frequently about the old days. Now —
The car swung into the yard. Speight crouched, watching. It was an old Chevy, a ’58 or ’59, rusted out badly. There must have been thousands of them in Nogales, rotting Mex cars, with broken windows and lead-painted fenders and doors from other vehicles.
Come on. Let’s go, thought Speight.
The driver killed the engine. It died with a gasp and the car ticked hotly for several seconds. Speight could see the two men scanning the yard. They couldn’t see him behind these crates. He could just sit there. It wasn’t too late to forget it.
But he knew he couldn’t forget the $500.
The $500 was now running the show.
Oh, hell, Speight thought.
He stood, stepped out.
“Over here,
Now he was finished. He’d done it, or rather, had it done. He remembered similar moments from books — Rabbit Angstrom rising from the whore Ruth, Stingo from his Sophie — but they were no help at all. His experience was of a different denomination, with fat Anita on a dirty bed on a sticky floor in a room that smelled of Lysol, under the eye of a glowing Virgin. Yet he felt rather good. In fact he was astounded by his bliss. The actual moment, the actual ultimate instant, with the hulking woman down beneath him, working hard, his own hands gripping something, his muscles tense, his mind pinwheeling: yes, indeed. He smiled.
“Round the world, baby? Only feefty more dollar?”
“No. Oh, uh, no, I don’t think so,” Trewitt said dreamily.
“Come on, baby. We can have some more fun.”
“Ah. I don’t think so. I appreciate it, I really do. I just don’t think so.”
“Sure, baby. It’s your money.”
She retrieved her underpants and pulled the dress over her head and there she was, presto chango, the old Anita. It was as if nothing had happened, and he realized that for her nothing
He pulled up his pants, tucked in his shirt, and fastened his belt.
“Ten dollars, baby.”
“Ten dollars! I already paid. Hey, I paid you a fair amount!”
“Rent, baby. You gotta rent the room. Is not free, nothing free. For the towel, the clean sheets” — yeah, fresh out of the dryer sometime in 1968 — “It’s for the big boss. He beat me up if I don’t get it.”
What was the difference? But this was costing a fortune. He was counting it out in ones when he heard the siren.
He raced down the steps two at a time, almost spilling out of control at the end as he lurched into the now- empty bar. The boy Roberto quietly polished glasses and nearby Oscar Meza sat at a table talking with a bulky policeman in a crisp tan uniform with a yellow tie — yes, yellow, canary yellow, screeching yellow — whose beefy shoulder was looped with a final ludicrous touch, a gold braid.
Trewitt tried to gain command of himself, but the cop looked over to fix him with a set of dead eyes.
Trewitt smiled casually, and tried to shuffle out.
He heard the word
Trewitt reached the door and stepped into the night. He could see nothing except the railroad tracks beyond the street and beyond that, Oscar’s competition, the Casa de Jason, another nightclub. Trewitt descended the steeply pitched parking lot to street level and turned. Five hundred yards ahead, beyond an arcade of canopied shops adjacent to the railroad tracks, lay the border; he could see it in lurid light, and the beggars and cabdrivers collecting there, a cruel, high fence, a traffic jam, booths, and a fortresslike bridge of offices overhead. He could see no flag; but, beyond the fence, he saw something perhaps more emblematic: the golden arches of McDonald’s.
Then he saw the crowd. It had gathered just up the street at what seemed to be a bridge at the corner of Calle Buenos Aires and the Ruis Cortina. Indians, a few Americans, Mexican teenaged girls in tightly cut American jeans and blouses, but mostly policemen. Three or four gray pickups had been parked nearby and by their uniformity Trewitt realized they were official vehicles.
Warily, he walked into the crowd; he could hear, among other things, the trickle of water.
It smelled here. Something? What? The odor was overwhelmingly familiar. His nose picked it apart but could not identify it — too many other odors were woven into it. But it was disgusting.
The crowd had gathered at the bottom of the street. It was a cobbled, climbing street that traveled up the side of a hill, lit intermittently by overhead lamps. He could see signs of the shops that ran partway up the hill, before the road disappeared into darkness: a dental clinic, a TV and stereo shop, a small food shop on the other side of the street, and a few others. But Trewitt pushed his way through the crowd and came soon enough to the wall, where he stood by three policemen who were talking rapidly among themselves. Lights — there were lights back here. He could feel the warmth, the human warmth, of people all around. He was aware that the blank brick wall that stared back at him twenty feet away was the wall of Oscar’s, of the whorehouse; the gurgle of water was very strong indeed, but he could not quite get to the edge, to look into the — the whatever it was that lay before him and had drawn all these people.
He gave a last, mighty shove, and broke through two men and came to the edge.
The scene, in fact, was a phenomenon of light. The Mexican faces, fat and slack, Indianesque in their unreadability, almost Asian, and the pencil moustaches; and the indifferently blazing headlamps from the police trucks, throwing beams that cut this way and that through the crowd, and a jumble of shadows on the wall beyond.
