Why had he picked this unlikely time and place for his challenge, as awkward to answer as the one about wife-beating? The motor idled expectantly. Voice deliberately light, Mary said, “There must have been a more reassuring way to put that,” and then Brennan’s face seemed to spring at her as the windshield was caught in an explosion of light.
There was a long shriek of tires from the car coming at them the wrong way, invisible behind its flaring, dazzling beams; a jolt as Brennan rammed his car into gear and wrenched it to the right and up over the curb; a thin tearing sound of metal against metal, a heavy shudder and then, almost daintily, a tinkle of falling glass. And, for just a second, heart-adjusting, nerve-reacting silence.
Brennan was wordlessly out of the car, slamming the door behind him with force. Mary, chest still hammering with left-over alarm, could understand his wrath: if he hadn’t stopped the car, if they had been approaching the corner, a head-on collision would have been inevitable. She twisted in her seat to peer through the rain-pebbled rear window, and saw Brennan walking toward a man and woman standing defensively against the glare from their remaining headlight. A dialogue commenced, Brennan with his head down and his hands pushed into his pockets as though commanding himself to be quiet.
The woman detached herself and came to bend and look in at Mary, who rolled the window down. Short gray curls and ruddy face under a plastic rain hat: this was one of the group at the Casa de Flores.
The recognition was mutual. “You’re at the motel, aren’t you,” asked the woman, “with that very sk—, I mean that very slender girl? My husband is just explaining that the one-way sign up there is bent and we didn’t see it until too late. I hope you didn’t get too shook up?”
She was jaunty with nerves. Mary said no, politely; what about her?
“Oh, this has been a trip, let me tell you,” said the woman elliptically. She bent closer. “Do you get the feeling that we’re being watched by maybe seven hundred people?”
It was true, thought Mary. Although the only witnesses bodily on the scene were a trio of small boys who had appeared with magical swiftness, the night felt alive with eyes, possibly scornful ones. Anglos coming over the border to buy liquor inexpensively (although Texas exacted its bite, even from non-Texans), feeling free to misbehave as they wouldn’t at home . . . She felt more than ever like an intruder.
All at once, as abruptly as it had arisen, the incident was over. The rain-hatted woman vanished in response to an indistinct hail, car doors slammed, Brennan got in beside Mary and switched on the ignition. “I’m sorry,” he said, glancing at her. “So much for short cuts in strange places. I guarantee that we’ll have a drink in hand, one way or another, within the next ten minutes.”
His tone was free of temper, his hands on the wheel were not. In view of a strange and hollow thumping from the rear at every unevenness in the street, and there were many, Mary thought it diplomatic not to inquire about the extent of the car’s damage. Brennan volunteered it after a block or two, his taut grip relaxing. “We’re not really falling apart, the bumper got ripped loose at one end. What’s the matter?” he asked sharply as Mary leaned forward and stared past him at a brightly lighted corner.
“Nothing, I just saw someone from the motel,” said Mary inadequately. She craned back as Brennan completed his turn onto the main street, but the doors of the nightclub had already closed upon Astrid and the extraordinary man with her.
Over a drink, secured almost within the limits of the guarantee, Mary told Brennan about Astrid, omitting out of loyalty her own conviction that the girl’s note had a direct connection with Jenny’s self-destructive urge on the diving board. “The man she was with certainly isn’t her uncle,” she ended. “He—”
Brennan waited, absorbed, attentive, and Mary realized that she had only started on this at all to dilute the disturbing intensity with which he had studied her across a room instead of across a table the evening before. It came home to her too that to describe Astrid’s companion as dark-blond and fairly tall would be meaningless, like describing a chair as having four legs.
It was true that she had had only one fast glimpse of that surprising face, but there were faces—or the personalities stamped on them as indivisibly as the light in which they were viewed—for which one glimpse was enough. Further observation could not enhance but only dull the initial impact.
“They are,” said Mary considering it carefully, “a matched pair.”
Brennan nodded comprehendingly. He remembered Astrid from the motel dining room, and now he suggested, “She spotted this dazzling fellow, a case of like meeting like, and persuaded her relatives to stay on after all. She looks like a girl who gets her own way without even trying.”
It was an accurate observation, and a fresh drink was set before them and Brennan was recommending the roast beef. In a small clear interlude a voice at the next table said, “ . . . six years, and that was for a couple of joints! Have you any idea what these prisons are like?”
The restaurant was expensive, and Mary thought it was time to contribute something to the evening. She asked Daniel Brennan if he came to Juarez often,
