Fifty Grand

Angela spat. “You’re both crazy,” she muttered. “Come on, I need an answer.”

“I’m not going,” I said.

“Me either,” Paco agreed.

Angela nodded. “Well, it’s your funeral,” she said in English.

I hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. Paco hugged her. She ran across the parking lot and Luisa helped her into the VW.

They waved as they drove out, honking the horn and flashing the lights like they were going to a fair, which I suppose they were, after this shitty town.

Lucky they left when they did. Twenty minutes after they made the highway Esteban’s Range Rover pulled in.

Paco and I retreated to the kitchen to prepare dinner but one of Esteban’s remaining goons must have told him what had happened, because soon after we heard him yelling and screaming and running from room to room to see who was missing. When he found us in the kitchen he wasn’t relieved, he was pissed off. “They didn’t want you? What’s your fucking problem?” he demanded.

“Watch your language, there’s a lady present,” Paco said.

Esteban snorted, glared at us, and then left without saying anything more.

“Dinner?” Paco asked.

“I’ll make something,” I said, more than happy, again, to cook for someone else. For a man.

I opened the freezer and found strip steak. I fried it in garlic and olive oil.

We could still hear Esteban outside yelling and ranting like a child but we ignored him. In another pan I fried squash and plantains. Paco put on the rice.

He cut me two kiwifruits and an orange.

The juice ran over his fingers and for a moment I wanted him to feed me the fruit from his sticky hands. His hair had fallen over his face again and he smelled of pine and sun.

I took a beer from the fridge and pressed it against my forehead and asked him to set the table.

There were at least a score of other people in the motel at that moment and most of them worked for Esteban, but even so, for some reason, when he’d calmed down he came back to us.

He was carrying a bottle of tequila and three glasses.

“Excuse me,” he said when he saw that we were eating.

“Pull up a chair,” Paco said.

“Join us,” I agreed.

I halved my steak and gave him rice and a tortilla.

He poured three measures of tequila.

“Salud,” he muttered.

We knocked back the tequila and Esteban refilled our glasses.

“Eat something,” I said.

He ate. “Not bad,” he admitted.

“How are you doing after this morning?” I asked him.

Esteban grunted and told Paco an abbreviated and much more heroic account of this morning’s episode with the sheriff.

“Sheriff seems to have a lot of power around here,” I said.

“Don’t worry about him. I have him in my pocket. He’s a fool, he acts big but he has the brain of a cow.”

“I heard some of the guys say he was in the war. He was in Iraq,” Paco said.

“No, no, not this war, the first one. He was in the Marines. He was in Kuwait. Not this one,” Esteban said with a dismissive sniff.

“He is a frightening man,” I found myself saying.

And he did frighten me. Why was he at the garage? Why was he looking into the accident? What was his angle? Something Ricky missed?

“Worry not, little rabbit. He is nothing. If this were Mexico I would deal with him, but here…” Esteban muttered and waved his hand in the air with contempt.

“He seems to have a finger in a lot of pies,” I asked, probing perhaps too hard. Esteban glanced at me, took another sip of tequila. His eyes narrowed a little and even Paco gave me a second look.

Too many questions.

I played meek, eating, looking down at my plate. I tuned out as the boys talked soccer. Esteban swallowed tequila, two shots for every one of ours.

Finally he stopped eating, banged the table with the flat of his hand, looked at me, time traveled back to the end of our conversation.

“No, don’t worry about him. He thinks he’s a player. He thinks he runs this town. If truth be told, it’s me-I run it. He doesn’t know half of what’s going on. Not half of it. Motherfucker, he’ll get his one day, you’ll see. You’ll see.”

His eyes dark, violent.

I thought about his Range Rover.

Of course, as Ricky pointed out, if you were very stupid, or very bold, you could hit a man, kill him, and never bother to get the car repaired at all, just drive around without a care in the world, knowing that up here the life of a dead Mex wasn’t worth a goddamn thing.

Esteban swallowed the last of his steak, smacked his lips. His cheeks were red, his face puffed.

I switched the conversation back to sports and Esteban tried to explain the difference between rugby and American football. Of all the subjects I wasn’t interested in, this proved to be near the top.

Time dragged.

When he was finished with his meal Paco thanked me solicitously and gave Esteban such a black look that despite his mood he remembered his manners. “Oh, this was perfect, Maria, thank you so much for making it for us,” he said. “There’s nothing like good food to raise your spirits.”

“It’s just something I threw together,” I replied, finding that I wasn’t immune to the compliment.

“No, no, it was delicious,” Esteban replied.

We had no sweetmeats but we had cigarettes and the rest of the tequila.

We moved together to the upstairs balcony of the motel.

Esteban stared at us and shook his head. “They didn’t trust you. Too new. Fuckers. Ungrateful fuckers. I’ll show them,” he said, and he stomped off to his suite at the east end of the motel.

“He’s drunk,” I said to Paco.

“No, he can hold it better than that,” he replied.

But either I was right or Esteban had serious mental problems, because a couple of minutes later he came out of his room with a hunting rifle. He shot it into the woods half a dozen times yelling Chinga tu madre and other obscenities, and when he tired of that he went into his room and turned on his Mexican polka music at full blast, singing along, shouting the lyrics over the desultory sound of electric accordions.

“This place is messed up. We should have gone to L.A. with the others,” Paco said sadly.

“You should have gone, I need to be here,” I replied.

Paco looked at me for a long time. He could sense that I was keeping something back. “Tell me,” he said, at last.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said weakly.

“Oh, I know this one,” Paco said.

I listened to the tune but I didn’t recognize it.

“I don’t know it.”

“Really? It’s called ‘Ghost Dance,’ it’s very popular. It’s about the Day of the Dead,” Paco said, giving me another skeptical look.

“Blood and death! Blood and death!” Esteban was shouting until he grew hoarse.

Eventually the tape stopped and someone helped Esteban into bed.

The clouds cleared. Mars rose between the branches of a blue spruce, and after Mars, Venus and then the big glassy seashore of stars, the Via Lactea.