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  ADVANCE UNCORRECTED PROOF

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  Mañana

  William Hjortsberg

  For Rob and Fred

  los amigos que aún no se encuentran

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

  —MACBETH

  Mañana is soon enough for me.

  —PEGGY LEE

  MAUNDY THURSDAY

  Deep in the winter after the Summer of Love, the bright bloom of Flower Power faded to black. By the start of Semana Santa, the cities north of the border were all on fire. The week before, an unknown assassin gunned down Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, and the beautiful nonviolent dream ignited into incendiary nightmare. It all seemed so far away, stoned on the beach at Barra de Navidad in the cowboy state of Jalisco.

  My own nightmare began late in the morning of Holy Thursday when I woke up soaked in blood. My head throbbed with the funereal drumbeat of last night’s drugs and booze. I didn’t know where the hell I was, disgusted because I thought I’d pissed myself in my sleep. When I went to rub my swollen crusted eyes, I saw my hand, gory as a butcher’s. I imagined internal hemorrhage, terrified I’d puked up blood in the night. Handfuls of Percodans washed down with tequila. A night lost to memory.

  I recalled Nick easing the spike into my forearm, my first shot of heroin, a skin-pop because I was too chickenshit to mainline. Maybe all that junk ate a hole in my guts. I studied the pebbled concrete ceiling wondering how long it took to bleed to death internally. Then I rolled over and looked straight into Frankie’s wide-open eyes. A fat black fly stilt-walked across her turquoise iris. Her throat was cut from ear to ear. More flies gathered like tiny demons feeding along the ragged incision.

  Numb from drug excess, I stared at her more out of curiosity than shock. Frankie’s corpse might have been some exotic sea creature I’d come across washed up on the beach. She was naked. I studied the spread-winged eagle tattooed across her flaccid breasts trying to remember what had happened. Almost everything following the skin-pop came up a total blank.

  After a hundred years, maybe only a few seconds, I struggled to sit, my hangover thundering inside my skull like ninepins falling in hell’s bloody bowling alley. The wooden window shutters were closed. The room remained mercifully free from sunlight. A dim dank cave reeking of spilled beer and tequila. Over in the corner, a cheap, unshaded ceramic table lamp with a low-wattage bulb provided dubious illumination. I looked around, more surprised at finding the place deserted than by waking up next to a dead woman. No one had crashed on the two other beds. What was really strange, the room had been stripped clean. The cheap thrift-shop suitcases and piles of dirty clothes, all gone. Along with Nick’s bongos, Doc’s chess set, the shortwave radio, and a cardboard box full of the Western novels Shank was hooked on.

  Hauling myself out of bed felt worse than swimming to the surface in a cesspool full of puss. The effort made my stomach lurch. I staggered into the john and splashed water on my face at the sink, hoping to clear my head. It was like I’d been poisoned. I avoided the grimy mirror and tried putting the pieces back into place. Nothing fit.

  I was bare-ass except for the bloody T-shirt but couldn’t remember getting undressed. Wandering around in a daze, I located my huaraches and shorts under the bed. The empty sheath for my Randall knife hung from a worn hand-tooled belt lying several feet away. Poking among the gory wadded sheets, I touched Frankie’s cold, stiffening legs. Her chilled flesh brought on renewed waves of nausea. I forced myself to do it and found the knife wedged under her buttocks, lacquered with blood.

  I had to clean myself up. No way I could face Linda looking like something run through a meat grinder. I went to the front window and opened the shutters a crack. The cherry-red Firebird was gone. Only a vacant parking space outside. Bitter Lemon, my battered VW microbus, always such a sorry short compared to the gangster-mobile, slumped against the curb by the front door to our place on the other side of the wall. The van deserved its nickname. The transmission went out a week after we drove it off the lot. I stared at the California license plate and rotting tail pipe wired up with a coat hanger, all so comfortably familiar. I wanted to replace the unexpected madness with something ordinary. The horror behind me remained palpable in its silence.

  I closed the shutters. The sun-bright day outside burned blue-green on my retinas. Made the dim room even darker. I didn’t meet Frankie’s vacant stare, staggering past her shadow-shrouded corpse to the shower. There was no hot water. In the tropics, even cold felt pleasantly tepid. I stood under the shower’s spray and stripped off my T-shirt, wringing out the blood. A thin sliver of deodorant soap was the best I could find. All the shampoo and shaving cream, Dopp kits, razors, and cologne had been cleaned out of the bathroom. I soaped my hair and washed the knife. Last night remained a blank.

  I remembered the day back in September when Linda and I realized our time in San Francisco was over. Speed freaks talked in tongues on every street corner. Runaway teenagers hustled spare change outside the supermarket. The whole trip began feeling like an enormous bummer. We decided to split for Mexico and hung with friends in LA for a week or so before rattling across the border just as Hurricane Beulah crashed into Corpus Christi.

  Our own weather remained fair and sunny all the way south to San Blas, a place we’d been tipped-off about by Santa Cruz surfer buddies. The little coastal town was plagued by swarming gnats and mosquitoes. After two tormented days, we called it quits, driving on toward Guadalajara from where we turned west back down to the coast. A biker in San Blas said to check out Barra de Navidad. We pulled into the isolated seaside village the day Che Guevera got offed in Bolivia.

  Barra felt perfect. Small, out of the way, no tourists aside from urban Mexicans down for the weekend; the only gringos, mellow hippies and surfers like us. We found half of a cement-block duplex one street from the beach renting for two hundred pesos a month. It had running water, electricity, and a flush toilet. Twenty-five bucks was a monthly nut within our vagabond budget.

  The lukewarm water streaming through my hair and over my face and chest felt magical, only a few degrees cooler than the tropic air. The sultry spray made me imagine I was floating in a Mexican rain cloud. Frankie’s blood had been washed away, and the abhorrence lying in the other room seemed as remote as a crater on a distant planet.

  Barra had been our haven, the perfect place to write my novel. I worked every morning, and in the afternoons we got high and body-surfed in Melaque Bay, curling waves foaming onto a mile-long crescent of beach. It seemed ideal for the first couple weeks. Right after the Día de Los Muertos everything changed, even if we didn’t know it at the time. All Saints’ Day is a big deal in Mexico. It’s a bank holiday and kicks off a three-day festival when people honor their dead, bringing flowers to the graveyard, and building private altars where candles, food, candy, tequila, and a sweetbread called pan de muerto are placed alongside photographs of their deceased loved ones.

  Linda and I stayed out late that night, eating skull-shaped sugar candy and dancing on the plaza with villagers costumed as cadavers. Back at the pad, we got it on and fell into a dreamless tequila-induced sleep only to be awakened in the dead of night by the sound of someone retching on the other side of the wall behind our bed.

  “Looks like we’ve got junkies next door,” I said to my wife, assuming a hipster’s make-believe savvy. Turned out I was right on the money. Our unseen neighbors puked all day long and through our following sleepless night. Linda and I muttered about how hard it must be to kick. We might as well have been discussing molecular biology.

  On the second morning when I opened the shutters to greet the alway
s surprising early morning bustle, I encountered Nick, shirtless, leaning out his window next door smoking a cigarette. He looked to be in his late thirties, about ten years older than me. With his mustache and black hair combed straight back off his forehead, Nick could have been a youthful Cesar Romero. A vivid tattoo of a spider weaving its web across his right deltoid was enhanced by the pallor underlying his tawny complexion. He had a broad engaging smile and an easygoing manner. We started talking and hit it off right away. Just another chance encounter, fellow travelers in the third world. Before the day was over, this total stranger was my new best friend.

  Linda and I started hanging out next door. Nick was a Gemini, Frankie a Libra. A good pair. His dual nature balanced by her impartiality. Nick had a Zenith Transoceanic that drew in the jazz stations from L.A. and San Diego, and he’d beat a Latin counterpoint rhythm on his bongos to the improvisations of Miles, Monk, and Zoot Sims. Told me he’d played with Art Pepper in San Quentin. I assumed he’d been sent up for junk like a lot of musicians. It never occurred to me to think of him as a criminal.

  Linda and Frankie bonded right from the start. A Mount Holyoke girl and a hooker, opposites attracting like magnets. You could tell Frankie had once been a beautiful woman. Booze and drugs had eroded her youth like sand storms blurring the features of the Sphinx. She told Linda that she only turned tricks to score a fix. She said she hadn’t had her period in ten years because of using heroin. My wife couldn’t get enough of that kind of shit.

  Nick and Frankie might have kicked, but they weren’t exactly clean. They got stoned on codeine and various painkillers scored without prescriptions at the corner farmacia. From time to time, friends in the States sent spoonfuls of white powder folded in slips of paper inside air-mail letters. And, there was always weed. Linda and I brought a couple lids in with us from L.A. Got a big laugh out of that, smuggling dope into Mexico. We burned through our little stash in under three weeks. Then, it was catch-as-catch-can, scoring smoke on the beach from other wayfarers like us.

  It felt risky even after hooking-up with Memo, a teenager from Guadalajara, who packed a bolsa-load of pot on the bus to Barra every weekend. Nick didn’t dig Memo at all. Said he was a gutter punk, the kind Federales kept their eye on. Said he was poison, would rat us all out for a peso. Nick found some Indian kid down from the mountains and made a deal to buy twenty-five kilos.

  “It’s Michoacán,” he said. “The best. No more copping on the beach.”

  The price was five hundred pesos. Splitting it meant twenty bucks for me and Linda. Weed went for a hundred dollars a key in Frisco. Seemed like a good investment. Nick didn’t have a car so I went to pick up the load of mota, driving south toward Colima and turning off before the city onto the Paso de Potrerillos road. The potholed pavement ended at the Michoaccán border. From there, it was more like driving on a dry streambed. My directions were to look for the kid waiting by the side of the road after three or four miles.

  Solemn under his straw hat, he stood in the shade of a mango tree with two skinny horses. I locked the van and rode for about an hour up a narrow trail into the unknown, chafing on the wooden saddle. We dismounted by a palm frond-roofed palapa where the Indian kid’s mother squatted, brewing coffee on a charcoal fire.

  They fed me tamales and coffee with sweetened condensed milk like the guest of honor. This made me nervous. After waiting most of the afternoon, I regretted being alone in the jungle with all that money. Two men arrived late in the day, wearing machetes at their waists and leading a burro packed with a large burlap-wrapped bale. I felt electric with adrenaline. After a handshake, I gave them the cash, all buenos amigos now. The kid and I rode back to my van with the big bundle. It was past nine at night by the time I returned to Barra.

  We made a party out of cleaning the shit, setting the unwrapped bale on a sheet of cardboard. Nick found several boards somewhere, laying them on top. We drank beer and danced on the boards to the throb of the Transoceanic. By dawn, we had it all reduced to bowls of herb, a shoe box full of seeds and twin tumbleweed clusters of twigs and stems, which I drove out of town and tossed under the palm trees where the paved road began.

  Our share filled an empty five-kilo Nido powdered milk tin. Made me feel like Pretty Boy Floyd or Jesse James. A cool desperado riding through the night. That romantic outlaw trail led straight to Frankie, bled-out on the bed in the other room.

  I wanted to stay in the shower forever, lost in the spray of a tropical waterfall. Stomach-turning spasms of fear brought me back to the silent terror behind the door. I turned off the faucet. There were no towels. I padded naked into the other room leaving a track of wet footprints across the smooth concrete floor. Wrapping the Randall in my clean-rinsed T-shirt, I slipped into my shorts and car tire–soled huaraches. In the kitchen, I peeked through an opening in the back shutters. Other than a couple pacing chickens, all was quiet. No sign of the landlord’s family on the low adobe veranda across the sandy backyard.

  I grabbed my belt and sheath before sneaking out the back door and up the steps onto the roofed-over porch behind our place. Safe on a folding chair by the oilcloth-covered card table, I felt like I’d just crossed the border from a foreign country. The porch had a simple concrete sink just like the dreary walled-in kitchen next door. The two little apartments shared identical floor plans except ours wasn’t completely enclosed. More pleasant cooking and eating in the open air. My familiar world, always so safe and comfortable, now felt pregnant with silent menace, contaminated by evil. The future stretched ahead like an empty wasteland. What would I say to Linda? There’s a dead woman next door. I can’t remember if I killed her. Sorry I stayed out all night.

  I held my breath and went inside. The room contained the same shadowy gloom as the death chamber beyond the wall. “Linda,” I whispered, getting no answer. It was close to noon. I didn’t hit the light switch. In the always-shuttered junky pad, lightbulbs burned day and night. I opened our shutters and let sunlight in. The bed had not been used. Maybe she went to the beach. Sat drinking a beer someplace. I peeked into an empty bathroom. “Linda …?”

  Sitting on the bed feeling oddly relieved, it hit me what was wrong. Linda’s clothes were gone. Shoes, jewelry, makeup, all the bathroom stuff, the woven bolsas she used as luggage and her leather shoulder bag. Not one trace of Linda remained. What did this mean? Our VW waited outside. My wife either left on the local bus or in the gangster-mobile. Shank and Doc held the keys to the Firebird. Nick was doubtless along for the ride.

  Everything came up blank. Why was I left behind? Maybe I killed Frankie and they tossed me to the dogs. Or the real murderer made me the fall guy. You had to get caught to be the fall guy. I had time on my side. No one knew Frankie was dead. A dark unknown dread suffused the ordinary with terror. Everything came into sharper focus. I’d never felt so vital and alive.

  I packed everything in under fifteen minutes, stripping the porch kitchen first while the landlord’s yard remained still and empty. The table, chairs, and Coleman stove were folded and stashed inside. Next, all the cooking stuff, plates, and utensils went into the orange crates we used for storage. I piled them on the bed and returned to the back steps, lifting my soon-to-be-abandoned corrugated garbage pail aside to dig the Nido tin full of pot out of the sand with a soupspoon.

  I closed and locked the back door. Clothes got stuffed into a war-surplus duffel. The portable typewriter nested in a clever self-containing case. My toolkit and a carton of paperbacks sat by the street entrance. I bundled my so-called novel, stripped the sheets and pillows from the bed, and rolled up the Two Gray Hills rug Linda bought at the Old Faithful Hamilton store on our way to Frisco in the summer of ’65.

  Out onto the dirt street, hit by the full fire of the midday sun, I felt anxious to be on my way. None of the sparse foot traffic took any notice of a gringo packing his gear. Everything fit into a big storage compartment out of sight under the van’s foam-covered sleepi
ng platform. I’d built a set of shelves against the far wall. It had rails like on a ship, to keep stuff from sliding off. After one last look around inside, I locked the door behind me and drove off with the key.

  On the way out of town, I pulled over at the ice factory on the corner of the plaza. All the carnival rides waited like resting skeletons before their nighttime dance. I bought five kilos of ice for the cooler. My filtered water was almost gone. The near-empty bottle and two pesos got me a new twenty-five-liter supply.

  When Doc and Shank first showed up in the red Pontiac, the plaza looked more like an empty parking lot. They rolled in sometime mid-January, high on downers, and the slow-motion party began. The gangsters bumped around like zombies for days. Nick turned into another person, someone underwater. The junk came from a pharmacy they’d broken into on the way down.

  Shank, a wiry little man, had a way of showing both his uppers and lowers like a skull when he smiled. A double-Scorpio with a moon in Cancer, not the happiest of horoscopes. His real name was Burt Breitenbach. I never knew the others’ last names. Doc was a pudgy old guy in his fifties. He’d been married to a mob boss’s daughter, managed a casino in Vegas, and had thirty tailor-made suits in his closet. When his father-in-law learned he was a junky, Doc got kicked out on his ass to fend for himself. Doc wasn’t much good at that.

  All of them, genial Nick included, were parole violators. They’d each been inside for a ten-year stretch though not in the same joint. They went in listening to Frank Sinatra and came out to find the Beatles topping the charts in a strange new world. Linda called them “secondhand gangsters.”

  Doc and Shank hooked up in L.A. and robbed a Beverly Hills jewelry store with another guy who was supposed to drive the getaway car. When the alarm went off early, the driver panicked and peeled out of the parking garage across the street, leaving his partners holding a satchel full of Patek Philippes and the wallet of a customer surprised while paying for his purchase. With no time to grab anything else, Shank and Doc ran for the parking garage. They tossed their Saturday-night specials down a storm drain as the fuzz roared up outside the jewelers. Finding no car, they slipped out the back and into a Hertz office down the block where they rented a convertible with a credit card from the stolen wallet.