no men, only women and children, their faces smeared with soot, the color of their hair impossible to define.
'They're gitanos. They fix dishes with chicken guts. They steal them out of hog pens. You can't do nothing for them,' Redfish said.
'Where are the men?' Temple asked.
'A bunch of them got in a fight with knives. The jefe got them out at his ranch for a while. Look, senorita, this is a house of puta. Maybe it ain't good you go in there,' he said.
'I'll try not to have impure thoughts,' Temple said.
'Johnny Krause ain't grown up inside, know what I mean?' Redfish said to me.
'No,' I said.
'Neither do I,' Temple said, leaning forward on the seat.
'All the gitanos ain't just up in them caves or out at the jefe's ranch,' he said, and looked out the window at the dusty surface of the lake.
At the end of the road beveled out of the hill was a whitewashed building that had probably been a powder house for a mining company and possibly later a jail. The walls were stone, the windows inset with bars, the roof covered with wood poles and tin and mounds of dirt that had sprouted grass. The casement of the front door was steel, bolted into the stone, and the door itself, which hung partially open, was cast iron and painted red. The paint was incised with every possible lewd depiction of human genitalia.
The bar and floor were made of rough-planed raw pine scorched by cigarette and cigar butts. The interior was bright with a greasy light from oil lamps, and the smoke on the ceiling was so thick it churned in gobs when someone walked under it. The faces of the customers were besotted and inflamed, their teeth rotted, their skin unnaturally lucent, like lemon rind. A child went in and out of the back door, emptying cuspidors and returning them to the bar and tables. Through the back windows and the open door I could see three pole sheds with burlap curtains hung from the roofs. Under the bottom of the curtains were slop jars and wash pans and the legs of either beds or cots.
'This is hard to take,' Temple said.
'It's all right to wait outside,' I said.
'I'm talking about that right over there,' she replied.
A dark-skinned girl not more than thirteen sat at a table with Johnny Krause. She wore a shift and a faded peasant dress that fit her hips like a sack. On her feet were blue cotton socks that had worked their way down on her ankles and old sandals whose straps were pulled sideways on the soles. Her cheeks were rouged, her mouth lipsticked, and she had braided her hair with glass beads. Her underarm hair looked like it had been touched there by a brush, her small teeth yellow-tinged with early decay. Johnny Krause put his hand on top of hers.
He removed it when he saw us, but not out of embarrassment. His grin stayed in place, his concentration shifting only out of momentary necessity.
'Remember us?' I said.
'Why not? You keep showing up. How's your eye, doll?'
He had pulled his brilliantined hair into a small matador's point in back and fixed it with a rubber band. He grinned at the girl and moved his eyes to the bar and gestured slightly with his head. After she was gone, he lifted a jigger of dark rum by the rim with two fingers and drank from it as though he were tilting a miniature bucket into his mouth. Then he drank from a bottle of Dos Equis and smiled pleasantly at us.
'Her folks are gypsies. They run off on her,' he said.
'You did Cholo Ramirez for Earl Deitrich. I suspect this ex-merc, Fletcher whatever, hired you. Earl's going down, Johnny. When he does, the guy who's first in line doesn't have to do the chemical nap,' I said.
'That's too bad about that kid Ramirez. The cops talked to me about it. But he was a gluehead, a street mutt, a hype, and a genuine crazoid. If his brains run out his nose, it's because he pulled the chewing gum out of his nostrils. I didn't have nothing to do with it.'
I sat down across from him. A box of kitchen matches was stuck in a ceramic holder in the middle of the table. He took one out and struck it on the striker and lit a cheroot cigar. The smoke was like wet leaves burning and maple syrup warming on a stove. The girl returned from the bar and lay her arm across his shoulders and let her thigh touch his arm, her face pouting. He whispered in her ear, then touched the small of her back with his fingers and nodded toward the bar. As she walked away his fingers trailed off lightly on the top of her rump.
'You must have been poured out of your mother's colostomy bag, Krause,' I said.
He laughed. His skin was olive-toned and smooth, dry and cool as the surface of a clay pot, as though his glands were incapable of secretion. 'You trying to get me to do scut work for you, like drop the dime on somebody, and you call me names? That's why you come all the way down here?'
'No,' I said.
The derision in his eyes and grin went away. 'Yeah?' he said, and made a rotating motion in the air with his upturned hand. 'You got some personal hard-on? Like I know you from somewhere else?'
'You put a pool cue in my investigator's eye. Then you were a smart-ass about it. You feel like a smart-ass tonight?'
He grinned again, then held up one finger at the girl, as though telling her he would be there in a moment. 'You want to get fucked up, there's lots of bars in Mexico. But I don't step in nobody's grief for free. You're out of luck, Jack.'
Temple squeezed me on the shoulder. 'I can't take the smell anymore, Billy Bob. Let's go,' she said.
'You're talking about these people's home. Show a little humility, lady,' Johnny Krause said.
I stood up from the table and saw my shadow fall across his face. He looked up and waited for me to speak. When I didn't, he sucked a tooth and drank from his bottle of Dos Equis and joined the gypsy girl at the bar. A fat prostitute in a black dress wobbled like a drunk bull out the back door and raised her skirt and urinated into the twilight.
Redfish pushed open the cast-iron door and walked ahead of us toward the Avalon. The hillside where the gypsies lived in caves was speckled with fires. I looked back through the brothel entrance at the plank bar, where Johnny Krause had slipped his arm over the girl's shoulders and was now walking with her toward the back door and the burlap-hung sheds in the yard.
'I left my keys on the table,' I said.
I walked past two Indian women at the bar, one of whom was unbuttoning an old man's fly, and picked up a thick, square bottle of mescal, the neck stoppered tightly with a long brown cork, a pale greenish worm floating in the yellow haze at the bottom. The weight was like a short-handled sledge in my palm.
Krause had stopped at the back door to talk to someone. The gypsy girl saw my face and shook his upper arm and cried out in Spanish. Just as Krause turned toward me I whipped the bottle by its neck across his mouth and heard his teeth clank like porcelain against the glass. He stumbled into the yard and bent double and cupped his palms to his mouth. Strings of blood blew in the wind between his fingers. I brought the bottle over my head, the mescal sloshing inside, and hit him again, this time across the ear. He went down in the dirt, where the woman had urinated, rolling out of the light that fell from the open doorway as though he could hide in the shadows.
I kicked him when he tried to get up and swung at his head again and missed and hit his wrist. It was unwinding fast now and I knew I was going to kill Johnny Krause, just as you know upon the pull of a trigger that the hammer is on its way home and you no longer have to make decisions about an adversary's fate.
Then the bull-like woman in the black dress grabbed my hand and thrust a lighted oil lamp in it, saying ' Quemalo. Burn him, gringo .'
The lamp was made of glass and tin and was oily and hot in my hand. Its glow shone up into the woman's porcine face. There were dirt rings in her neck and warts that protruded through the makeup on her chin. She punched me in the arm, hard, with the heel of her hand. 'Go ahead, gringo. Burn this one good,' she said.
I stepped back into the light from the doorway, my ears thundering with sound. Someone, Temple Carrol, I think, took the oil lamp and the bottle of mescal from my hands.
Johnny Krause sat up in the dirt, blood dripping off his tongue. He grinned up at me like a carved pumpkin that someone had cracked on a rock. He tried to speak but had to open his mouth and let it drain first. 'We're just alike. I saw it in your eyes. You get high on it. We're brothers-in-arms, motherfucker,' he said.
