Manana Page 2

  Dumb luck stayed with them even after they ditched the rental outside San Bernardino and hot-wired an unlocked Firebird. That same evening, the fugitive pair broke through the skylight of a pharmacy in Wickenburg, Arizona, scoring a little cash from the register and a bunch of drugs and hypodermic needles. Before leaving the premises, Shank and Doc had to fix. They shot up a bottle of Demerol and passed out, awakened in the morning by the sound of the front door unlocking. The slimmest of miracles allowed them to scramble out onto the roof before the mess was discovered. “The bungling burglars,” Linda joked behind their backs.

  Driving out of Barra for the last time added false nostalgia to the putrid stew of my mood. Shank always dressed in black. Black turtleneck, black watch cap, black trousers. He naturally complained of the heat and asked Linda to turn his pants into cut-offs. When she finished the alterations, Shank made an appearance dressed exactly the same including the knitted hat. His skinny white legs stuck out of the knee-length shorts like the shinbones of a skeleton.

  “How do I look?” he rasped.

  Picturing Shank at that moment, I found it hard to believe Linda had willingly run off with such losers. Maybe she was just with Nick? What if she saw me kill Frankie and wanted to get away? If one of the others did it, maybe he took her along because she’d seen too much. The passed-out fall guy had missed the whole thing.

  I drove ten miles to Cihuatlán, pulling up before the bank, a squat stone building on the main drag. It was just before they closed for siesta. I got my papers together, locked the van, and went inside to draw out my money.

  “Perdón, señor,” the pretty young teller said. I didn’t catch it all but made out “su esposa,” and “esta mañana temprano,” and realized she was talking about a withdrawal earlier in the day.

  “¿Cuánto?” I asked.

  “Todo.”

  I left the bank like a robot. Linda had cleaned out our account. More than five hundred dollars. All that remained from the twelve hundred bucks we’d worked our asses off for, typing on Flexowriters in the financial district nine-to-five to fund a long stay in paradise. Back behind the wheel, I made a tally of my assets. I had nearly a tank of gas. About eighty pesos in paper and coin in my pocket after buying the ice and water. Two emergency twenties were rubber-banded behind the sun visor in case of traffic stops. Handy for the little everyday bribes Mexicans called the mordida. That came to maybe fifteen bills American. My slim personal fortune also included five kees of clean killer weed. I’d have to get to Guad before seeing any cash out of that.

  Thinking about dope in my car made me glance up the street toward the cop shop. Captain Guzmán slouched against the peeling wall outside in his wrinkled khaki uniform. He chewed on a toothpick, cap visor pulled low on his forehead, staring straight ahead. I knew he’d seen me, just as I knew he kept the hammer of his holstered .45 automatic on half-cock. I’d become acquainted with the captain when Doc had a beef over a bar tab, claiming he’d been charged twice for his drinks. The patrón said Doc pulled a knife, an offense landing the old man in the Cihuatlán jail.

  Somehow I became the go-between and drove over every day from Barra hoping to straighten things out. Doc had it pretty good. He tipped a kid a peso each time for bringing his meals from a local cantina. I supplied enough downers to keep him mellow. Doc needed to pay up but refused to unbutton his change purse. One day, I came over and found his cell empty.

  Captain Guzmán was the man in charge. I’d seen enough of him to be afraid. When I asked about Doc, he grinned around his toothpick and said the viejo had been moved to Autlán de Navarro, the municipal capital.

  “Más duro en Autlán,” Guzmán said.

  Much tougher in Autlán. The captain’s words stayed with me as I drove up the twisting hairpin mountain road toward the birthplace of Carlos Santana. The Palacio Municipal stood on one side of the Jardín Hidalgo. I parked a block away. Barred iron grates set in the stone sidewalk let down light into a subterranean dungeon beneath the temple of justice. I called out to Doc, and he hurried from the gloom, pale, harried, his drip-dry beige suit soiled and tattered.

  He was desperate to get out. Because he was too old to fuck, a couple machitos had tied a string to his dick and yanked him around like a burro all night long. I said it might take every penny, and he shoved two hundred bucks in traveler’s checks up through the grate, claiming it was his entire stake. I found a lawyer who got him off for 150 dollars. Doc kissed and fondled the five traveler’s checks I gave back to him like they were a relic of Christ. It wasn’t that he lacked resources. He and Shank still had a satchel full of thousand-dollar watches.

  Thinking of Doc made me want to get as far away from Captain Guzmán as possible, pronto. I popped Bitter Lemon into gear, cruising out of town without looking back. I didn’t feel safe until I was nearly to Manzanillo and pulled off the road to roll a big, fat dorf. Funny how I coined that name. We had this huge pile of Michoacán and no rolling papers. Cigarettes were so cheap in Mexico no one rolled his own. You never saw a pipe smoker. We unraveled the tobacco from store-bought smokes and stuffed the empty paper tubes with mota. After experimenting with different sorts of paper cut to size, I found the outer wrappers of our Waldorf toilet tissue twisted up just fine, burning smooth and easy. When I rolled the first one for the gang next door, the letters DORF ran along the length of the joint like a trademark.

  Killer shit. Three or four hits got me stoned out of my gourd. Mission accomplished. Back on the highway, I felt better with every mile I put between me and stiff, cold Frankie, far off in Barra. I didn’t want to think about the mess I was in. Not yet. Why bring myself down? Better to clunk along in my dream world, random thoughts drifting through the corners of my mind like wind-blown gossamer. After Shank and Doc showed up, everything changed. Calmed by weed, our scene became something of a hipster sitcom: amiable ex-cons living next door to the innocent young couple so curious to taste every drop of real life.

  Most of the time, Linda and I were the squares made hip to the ways of the underworld by our criminal neighbors. Just once, we sat in the driver’s seat. Friends in Frisco sent us thirty hits of windowpane folded inside a copy of Zap Comix No. 1, a wacky offbeat comic book. The gangsters had never done LSD. One more social change missed during a decade in stir, along with the pill, the civil rights movement, and men in space.

  The blotter acid was laid out in five rows of six doses. I cut off the top row with scissors and clipped it into individual hits. The gangsters acted pretty cool about taking their first trip, thinking it would be like any other drug. They knew all about narcotics. Acid was different. I warned them not to pig out on food before they dropped. Linda and I fasted all day, going next door at dusk.

  We lit candles around the room. Nick found some mellow sounds on his shortwave. I passed out the hits, instructing the gang to chew them well and swallow the pulp. Waiting for the mysterious is always momentous. I enjoyed watching our new friends cope with the unspoken stress. Frankie stretched out on the bed staring silently at the ceiling. Nick sat in the corner tapping softly on his bongos. Linda brewed herbal tea in the kitchen with Doc hovering around her, pretending to help. Only Shank betrayed any apprehension, pacing back and forth like a caged panther.

  A couple hours later, their cool impenetrable facades crumbled like sugar cubes in water when the fluid psychedelic onrush swept over them. Impossible to deny five hundred mics of pure lysergic acid surging through your system. All barriers dissolved. Sound became tangible. Solid surfaces appeared porous. You were on your own, a solitary traveler into the unknown.

  Fear and acid don’t mix. Paranoia taps into the dark primal terror within. Drop ten milligrams of Valium before you trip or risk a descent into deep despair. Lost in my own inner wonderland, I lurched around the two-room apartment, observing the bold outlaws stripped bare to the core. Linda lay on the bed hugging Frankie who wept like the little girl she’d left behind y
ears ago. Nick found a new station on his Transoceanic and pounded the bongos to a violent Afro-Cuban beat until his fingertips bled.

  In the moldy enclosed kitchen, Doc sat at the table slicing vegetables with a cheap serrated knife. He wanted to make a stew. Doc was a great admirer of Kahlil Gibran and quoted snatches from The Prophet as he chopped carrots into ever-smaller pieces. “‘Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream,’” he mumbled, wielding his knife. “‘Trust …’” Mumble, mumble. “‘Dreams …’” Chop, chop. “‘Eternity …’”

  Back in the other room, I sat on the edge of the bed. My wife comforted a weeping prostitute while I listened to the insane throb of Nick’s drumming. I glanced over into the corner where Shank crouched, wild-eyed, grinning like the label on a poison bottle. “What you lookin’ at, you little fuck,” he demanded.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “So, now I’m nothing,” Shank spat at me. “That what you think, pretty boy?”

  I tried to disarm the situation before things got out of hand. Shank cut me off. “You look at a man in the joint like that,” he snarled, “and you’re asking for a shiv stuck between your ribs.”

  I said I was sorry. Shank narrowed his eyes. His voice dropped a notch lower into menace. “There was this one son-of-a-bitch in Folsom always giving me the look,” he said, every word etched with dread. “He bunked on the bottom tier. They unlocked the cellblock one row at a time when we went for chow or out in the yard. I set it up with a buddy to steal a can of gas from the motor shop. He was just ahead of me in line and tossed that shit into the prick’s cell as he walked past. I had a book of matches. Tell you what, matches ’re worth more ’n cigarettes in the can. I lit up the whole book and said, ‘Who you lookin’ at now, fuckface?’ Tossed in the matches and walked on to the mess hall. Flames blasted out through the bars like a tornado from hell. Fried that bastard crisp as a slice of bacon.”

  Shank said all this slow and steady, enunciating each word as if carving it on my tombstone. His lidded eyes never blinked. “Guess that took care of him,” I muttered as the floor swirled like rainbows under my feet.

  “You let a man disrespect you and get away with it,” Shank said, his burning, slitted eyes fixed on me, “you ain’t nothin’ but a piece a shit for all the world to fuck.”

  I smiled awkwardly at Burt Breitenbach and went back into the kitchen to listen to Doc quoting pop-culture aphorisms. The menace lurked in the other room like some demon waiting to swallow me whole. Doc had diced a bunch of carrots into molecular bits on the tabletop and was crashing around in a rage. He poked at a week’s worth of filthy clay pots and plastic dishes heaped in the concrete sink.

  “How can you stand to live like this?” he roared. “It’s different for us. We’re on the lam. I’d rather be back in stir. I kept my cell clean. Not like this filthy hippie shit!”

  I told Doc that Linda kept our pad next door neat as his beloved fucking cell. All this negativity was bringing me down. I slipped out the back and went for a long walk on the beach. A full moon rode high in the velvet tropic sky, casting a wavering silver path across the restless sea. It hit me like the Sistine Chapel painted by Bach. I wanted to take the pyrotechnics of my trip far away from all the gangster craziness.

  By the time I got back, I was starting to come down, acid visions surging in ever-diminishing waves. All was dark and quiet next door. I spotted the aurora borealis flare of a candle through our open window and stepped inside to find Linda sitting naked on the bed. “Hi, Tod,” she said, candlelight glinting in her green eyes and making her reddish hair glow like burnished copper. “Missed you.”

  Memories of our acid-fueled candle-lit lovemaking had me confused. Either Linda had run out on me, taking up with Nick and the others, or else she was their hostage, a replacement for Frankie, and they’d stolen all our money. If the first was true, I should make a run for the border on the double. But the slimmest possibility of her being a prisoner of someone like Shank made that impossible. There was no other choice. I had to find her. Somehow, some way, I had to get my wife back.

  A bit after three in the afternoon, I rattled into Colima, a pretty palm-shaded colonial town with twin snowcapped volcanoes towering ten miles distant. Along with Chihuahua and Oaxaca, Colima was the capital of a state with the same name. So good they named it twice, like New York, New York, my hometown. I’d only been here once before, about a month ago when Bitter Lemon needed more transmission work. The only certified VW dealership in the area was located in Colima. When the gang heard I was going, they put in a big order for downers. They’d worn out their welcome at local farmacias as far afield as Manzanillo. A sorry achievement in the casual, no-prescriptions-needed atmosphere of Mexican drugstores.

  They wanted Percodan or Hycodan. While the microbus sat in the repair shop, I wandered with a shopping bag from pharmacy to pharmacy, buying all the available narcotics. I got a surreal kick out of sweeping six or eight bottles of synthetic opiates off the countertops into my sack. No one refused when I asked for the drugs. Nick had given me several hundred pesos. Barely half of it was spent before I tapped Colima dry. I drove back to Barra with more than forty bottles of painkillers, the big sugar man with a load of candy for his friends next door.

  I figured my “friends” had gone on to Guadalajara after cleaning out my bank account. They knew a contact there who’d buy the stolen watches. Only two roads up to the big city, one through Colima or the shorter route by way of Autlán. I parked on a side street behind the cathedral and backtracked to all the farmacias I could remember, pretending to be looking for my cousin and his wife. My description of Nick and Linda got no results. I struck out everywhere. I threw Doc and Shank into the mix as an uncle and his friend, without luck. They’d obviously gone the other way. If they’d come through Colima, I knew they would have tried to score.

  I walked back to the Jardín Libertad. A guy with a pushcart sold tuba out in front of the cathedral. Naturally fermented sap from a coconut palm, tuba had a sweet alcoholic tingle. “Sin hielo,” I said, not trusting the ice was pure. He ladled out a tall glassful.

  “¿Cacahuates?” the vendor asked, wanting to sprinkle chopped peanuts on top. I shook my head and paid him a peso, crossing the street to sit on a cast iron bench where he could see I wasn’t going to run off with his glass. A pair of mangy emaciated pariah dogs, so common in rural Mexico, sniffed along the gutter. The plantain vendor’s steam whistle screamed like a demon from hell behind me in the plaza. I hadn’t eaten all day. The first mouthful of tuba caught in my gorge and I nearly puked.

  I had to cram some food into my lurching gut and found a tiled sandwich joint on a side street. After wolfing down a torta al pastor with avocado, I had them wrap another to go. It set me back three pesos. I needed to watch expenses until I scratched up more bread. Coming across a corner stationery store, I bought their cheapest postal scale for eighteen pesos. At a supermarket in the commercial district, I spent more precious dinero on a box of plastic sandwich bags and four bottles of Pacífico, my favorite Mexican beer.

  On the outskirts of town, I stopped at a Pemex station and topped off my tank with twelve liters of ninety-octane Gasolmex from the green pump. This cost another eight pesos and change. I was down to about ten bucks liquid capital.

  Back behind the wheel, I headed along Highway 110 toward the two tapering volcanoes. Colima became a distant mirage in my rearview mirror. I fired up a dorf, popped the cap on a cerveza, and found a radio station playing ranchera music.

  The road wound up into the mountains. Bitter Lemon chugged along, not setting any speed records. Didn’t matter much to me. No point getting anyplace in a hurry. Had no idea where I’d find Linda. Didn’t have any sort of plan. All I could do was get to wherever I was going. Every time I started coming down, I pulled over and twisted up another joint. I laid off the beer, saving it as a treat for when I stopped for the night.


  Past midnight, the road approached Tuxcueca, a village on the southern shore of Lake Chapala. I turned left, avoiding the scattering of lights. After a couple more miles, I came to a narrow dirt lane leading down toward the lake. Worth a chance and I took it, driving to a secluded spot. The night air felt cold wearing shorts. I pulled on a sweater and sat on a rock by the water’s edge to eat my second sandwich. A nearly full moon shone over the still black surface of the lake. Flecks of pale light winked at my dilemma.

  After finishing the soggy torta, I rummaged under the van’s sleeping platform for my tequila bottle. A couple snorts and a big fat dorf might ease my thoughts. Pulling the Zippo from my pocket, I came up with the key to our place in Barra. I hurled it out into the lake. It fell ten yards from shore, a soft plop in the moon’s rippling reflected light. I lit up and took a deep toke.

  A slug from the bottle burned its way down, leaving me none the wiser. Funny, remembering the past in such detail. All the whacko gangster misadventures, every odd detail for six months, each ticking second of today from the first moment I woke up lying next to Frankie’s corpse. What I couldn’t recall was everything after Nick shot the smack under my skin last night. It was like trying to bring back a dream.

  GOOD FRIDAY

  I was awake at first light, haunted by nightmares. Visions of Linda sprawled in a filthy bed with her throat cut stayed with me as I staggered out into the daylight. Once she took our money from the bank, the gangsters had no further use for my wife. She’d be a liability. Why would a classy chick like Linda travel with a bunch of second-rate deadbeats? She’d stand out like a nun in a whorehouse. Draw too much attention. Shank wouldn’t like that. What if Linda gave him the wrong look? Would he set her on fire?