The Woman Lit by Fireflies Page 14

  Billy called out from the house and Sun went in to tune the satellite dish to the San Francisco Giants game. Sam drank beer on the couch and dozed. Billy had a strangely familiar way of talking to her but then Sun remembered that Gwen had said Billy had a nineteen-year-old daughter. He was curious about Sun’s elaborate stereo equipment and the desk computer over in the corner. She blushed when she explained they were gifts from her father who was in business in Albuquerque. She loved her father, but a month a year with him was more than enough as that part of New Mexico was dreary, and so were all of his friends in the electronics business. Sam yawned at the ball game on television and suggested they go horseback riding which delighted Sun. She was a little surprised to see how he rode, and they stayed over-long in the hills so she could show him some coyote dens.

  When they got back to the ranch house Billy was grilling chicken and Gwen and Patty were setting up the picnic table in the backyard. Sun ran upstairs and set up two speakers at the windows of her room so she could play some tapes she had made of what she called “mother’s music” for the picnic. She hadn’t fully admitted it but she had come to prefer it over that of her own generation. Sun selected a tape that began with the Allman Brothers, B. B. King, then an Otis Redding-Carla Thomas duet, Janis Joplin’s “Get It While You Can” and Grace Slick singing “White Rabbit.” She adjusted the volume and ran back downstairs, checking out the kitchen window for a reaction. The four of them stood there so still, Sun thought, as if they were getting their pictures taken.

  The dinner vacillated between giddiness, melancholy, silence, laughter. Sun thought they were drinking too fast for the long haul, including her mother. Patricia wasn’t sure she could bear the music but was voted down. Sam roared with laughter at Grace Slick.

  “I always sort of liked that song but I never understood what the fuck it was about. Remember when we’d drop a few tabs of acid and just listen to music as if it actually meant something? It was a religion, wasn’t it?”

  This statement started a mostly good-natured quarrel. Then Sun interrupted with a question that turned out to be inept and almost disastrous. “If you guys are so smart, and I think you are, how come you got caught in the first place?”

  It was a show stopper but Sam tried to save the situation by jumping up and doing an elaborate pantomime of the raid on the draft board. Gwen and Billy were the lookouts while Patty held the flashlight for Zip and Sam who busied themselves pouring glue and cow’s blood into the files. Patty had dropped the flashlight and when the police bullhorn came on they all ran into each other in the dark hallway. Billy maintained boozily that they must have tripped an alarm. Then Patty became angry and said that Billy’s house might have been bugged in the planning stages, or someone had to have tipped the cops off. Gwen led Patty away to calm her down, and Sun ran into the house and upstairs to her room, embarrassed to have precipitated the quarrel. She turned off the music and reread an article about Brazilian Indians in Natural History. Billy and Sam yelled up for more music so she turned it back on. It was easy for Sun to see that something unpleasant was going on between Billy and Patricia.

  Sun dozed off then, having snuck two beers and a swig of Gwen’s martini. She awoke with a start when the long tape was finished. She got up to get a glass of water from the upstairs bathroom. Out the window, and just at the edge of the yard light, she could see Patty standing in a blue robe above Sam in his sleeping bag. His hand reached out and grabbed her ankle and Patty stooped down and kissed him. Then his hands drew up her robe and Sun looked away thinking, Jesus, these folks have got out of hand. She started down the stairs but heard Billy and Gwen talking so she stopped.

  “We’ll leave at dawn. The cool air will give us more lift.” Gwen said.

  “You’re still trying to get me off the hook just like the old days.”

  “I always thought of you as a good-hearted noodler. A good-looking noodler. A sexy noodler.”

  “Thanks. Give me a break. Kiss me good night.”

  “Absolutely not.” Gwen laughed, moving to the upstairs door behind which Sun fled.

  At dawn she bid them all goodbye with relief, then watched as Gwen made a pass over the ranch, dipping the wings in farewell. Sun, quite naturally, wondered if she’d ever see them all together again.

  When Sam finally got back to his mountain in late June and thought the whole thing over he felt that it might have worked if it had taken longer. Even the hot hours when nothing had happened had whirred past with the speed of the ubiquitous ceiling fans, which only translated hot stillness into hot breeze.

  The flight down was violently rough from a rare late May thunderstorm and their mutual hangovers misfocused every word said. When the sun came out Billy, who sat in front with Gwen, asked for his sunglasses in the kit bag at Patty’s feet. When she opened the bag the sunglasses nestled on top stacks of neat thatches of hundred-dollar bills. She exchanged glances with Sam and a little while later she became airsick. When they landed at the Nogales Airport and before they split up as per plan, everyone became irritated at Sam’s use of military terminology. Billy and Gwen would go to the house loaned to Billy and owned by the family of the Mexican consul in L.A. Sam and Patty would also stay on the American side of Nogales but would spend their afternoon across the border doing reconnaissance. No one liked the word “reconnaissance” because it made the world seem unnecessarily dangerous.

  An hour later Sam and Patty were sitting in a sidewalk cantina, listening to the oldest guitarist in the world and eyeing the police who emerged from the federal building across the street. They had driven around for an hour to get what Sam called “the lay of the land,” another term which irritated Patty. He explained that right-living Mexicans from the interior called Nogales and other border towns “poso del mundo,” which loosely translated as asshole of the country. On the way from the airport she had noticed the miles of fruit-and-vegetable warehouses, a billion-dollar local business, and on the tour Sam showed her the enormous American-owned electronics complex where scab wages were about five bucks a day. Sam had said that down here mere survival took the heart out of a man’s life. She said what about women, and he said everybody. Humankind.

  At the cantina it got rougher. He watched the federal building and drank margaritas while she drank agua minerale from a bottle.

  “Would you screw a cop to help out Zip?” he asked.

  “I’d have to think that one over.”

  “Gwen did. After she got out of prison she screwed a cop at Zip’s request so he could find out what happened. It was Billy’s girlfriend Sarah, the one he eventually married. She overheard us and called Billy’s dad who made a deal for a misdemeanor so Billy could practice law. But the cops insisted the plan go through so they could nail Zip and the rest of us, but mostly Zip. I’m telling you this so you’ll lay off Billy. This won’t work if you keep ragging him, so don’t say a fucking thing. I know you suspected it.”

  Patty tried to pretend she was shocked but she wasn’t. It all fell into place, confirming her suspicions.

  “So we’re helping him redeem himself?” she asked.

  “You know that’s bullshit. We would have come along just for the excuse of seeing each other again.”

  His smile was so warm that she tried to feel warm too. Only she didn’t. Or not quite. Because she used to be a continuity girl she noticed the same American in Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirt and baseball cap pass them twice in ten minutes on a motor scooter. She started to say something but Sam had noticed too, and the American was glancing back from a stoplight. On the way back to their motel on the Arizona side the customs man took overlong passing them through.

  Gwen didn’t like the villa where she was staying with Billy. It adjoined the border fence but was stuck grandly in a thicket of cottonwood, flowering bushes and planted bamboo. She felt tiny sitting on the sofa of the three-story living room. It was the most foreign house she had ever been in but Billy simply paced around, ignoring the room and waiting for the
lawyer. There was a two-ton orb of lapis lazuli in the hall and every bit of space was crammed with colonial and native antiques and artifacts, and ersatz revolutionary posters from the time of Morelos. Billy said the house was owned by the art dealer cousin of the Mexican consul.

  Gwen was about to repeat her complaint about their lodging when an enormous thug strode through the front door followed by a small, dapper Mexican lawyer in the kind of suit Billy wore. The thug told them in broken English to keep their door locked and disappeared. The lawyer introduced himself, kissed Gwen’s hand and asked Billy to pass along respects to his old friend Billy’s father. The lawyer’s English was perfect except for fractured idioms, telling Billy he was “barking up the wrong bush” coming to the aid of a horrible person, and that he should go home.

  “Is that it? Then you folks did a real shitty job.” Billy said. “What did you carry in that alligator briefcase all the way from Mexico City, your lunch?”

  Gwen was startled by this cold side of Billy which she had never seen before. The lawyer merely smiled and said that Billy was a hard man like his father. Then he opened his briefcase and rattled off his progress on the case, adding many absolutely new details. Zip and two other revolutionaries had been pursued to a canyon west of Nogales by a Federale captain and two soldiers. The Federale had been forced to shoot one of the revolutionaries and Zip had attacked him. The other revolutionary escaped. A puzzling fact was that the testimony of one of the soldiers had stated that an American had accompanied the Federale and kicked Zip in the spine so that they had to carry the prisoner. The lawyer said this fact had been removed from later testimony but he had paid plenty for the earlier records. He had also arranged for them to visit Zip any morning they wished. Afternoons would cost extra.

  “Why didn’t they tell me this three weeks ago?” Gwen asked, but they ignored her.

  Billy was pleased with the new items in the case but the lawyer was discouraging. The prosecutor would make Zip seem more dangerous, to justify the shooting of the revolutionary. And the presence of the American implied that the two countries’ intelligence networks might have been involved, which made it all very messy indeed. The United States was justifiably paranoid about a possible Communist revolution in Mexico, according to the lawyer who announced he was right wing but then business was business. He felt that Zip, despite his distant past, had become a harmless nitwit who was being pursued because certain as yet unknown authorities had nothing better to do at the moment.

  When the lawyer left Billy and Gwen sat there for a while as if poleaxed. Then Billy discovered the liquor cabinet, made her a drink and got himself a beer from the refrigerator. Gwen was so bleak that Billy gave her a hug, assuring her that they were going to kick ass, but there was the sense the warm air was water and they were drowning.

  It was on the verge of getting a little difficult back at the motel. Patty was propped up in bed in a bra and half-slip looking at a number of scripts she had brought along. Sam paced around shirtless in hiking shorts taking an occasional swig from a bottle of bacanora mescal. He was apparently trying to think well beyond the world of coyotes.

  “Why are you reading that shit? Try to think about what we’re doing.”

  “It’s not shit, it’s my homework. You ever been to Russia? I have and that’s what this place reminds me of. I haven’t learned enough about it to think. Actually, it occurred to me that Zip was supposedly trying to organize workers. Why don’t we try to get hold of some union people.”

  “That’s what I mean! That’s a fucking good idea. What else you got hidden in that big brain?”

  “I was wondering why you never tried to see me when you came home.”

  “You said after the trial that I ruined your life. I also wrote from the goofy ward and you never answered.”

  “That’s not trying very hard.”

  “It’s a helluva lot more than you did which is nothing.” Sam began sorting through his large backpack as if looking for something to do. He drew out two leather-wrapped packages and took out a 9 mm Walther pistol and a sawed-off Remington 12-gauge known in the trade as an “alley sweeper.” He poured Hoppe gun oil on a rag and began cleaning the weapons. Patty looked up from her script, shocked and speechless. Sam took another swig of mescal, then noticed that the blood had drained from her face.

  “I don’t like guns either. I never use them. I just have them in the hills because there’re some hunting types that don’t like me. But you got to have weapons if the other side has them, and they sure as hell do around here.”

  Patty’s reaction was to totally pack up her things and get dressed within a few minutes. He was too surprised to remonstrate. At the door, suitcase in hand, she said to offer Gwen and Billy her apologies, and Zip if they saw him, but it was too late in life for her to go back to prison because of a “fucking lunatic.”

  Late in the afternoon Billy went with the lawyer to visit an old friend of the lawyer’s, a mogul in the produce business who owned a hundred semis and a dozen warehouses. The meeting took place in Jorge’s office, an elaborate eyrie up in the corner of a vast warehouse. Jorge and the lawyer chatted about their chicas de casas (mistresses) before getting down to business. The lawyer asked Jorge to put in a good word with the judge on Zip’s behalf. Jorge knew the case and made a show of outrage over being asked to help a terrorist. Then the lawyer said that Billy had any number of politicians in the bag and if the U.S. decided to re-embargo Mexican produce Billy might be quite helpful. This idea did a good deal toward calming Jorge down, though he now pretended to be noncommittal. He smiled at Billy and said, “The intrigue and viciousness of our politics is impossible for an American to understand. Your graft is child’s play. A judge or politician here is capable of a double double cross, a triple cross. But perhaps I could make an inquiry.”

  Thinking it might be a morale gesture Gwen and Billy dressed up and strolled over to the Mexican side of the border for dinner. She dressed in lavender, he in a white tropical suit, a well-heeled couple bowed to in deference as they walked through customs. The American on the motor scooter stared at them from another stall, apparently knowing who they were. A block past customs Billy nodded to Sam who stood in front of a cantina across the street. Sam made an elaborate “who knows?” gesture and Gwen was irritated at the charade.

  “This is appalling, isn’t it? We don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “Calm down, you’ve got the first-day blues.”

  “You forget I was down here before. I heard you on the phone with the newspapers. It must be maddening to spend your life spieling that sort of bullshit.”

  “It’s a living. It’s also the way the world works when you’re not down on the farm.”

  “That’s not worth resenting.”

  They stopped on the street in front of the Coronado Restaurant, a little tremulous in their mutual refusal not to continue the quarrel.

  “People who went to college are usually better at saying awful things.” Gwen laughed.

  “We’re still getting over our hangovers.” Billy glanced at a blue sedan wedging its way into a parking place across the street. No one got out.

  All through a wonderful dinner of Guaymas shrimp and roasted loin of lamb they talked affably, almost giddily, of their absurd college camping trips. Zip had had a specious theory that the wilderness caused clear thinking, though only Sam actually knew how to camp. Gwen remembered as they drank a Montrachet and a Chambertin that Billy wasn’t on a budget. Billy reminded Gwen that on their last camping trip he had disastrously hauled along Sarah.

  “She got blisters and cried a lot,” Gwen said.

  “There was no place to shop in the mountains.” Billy was watching a burly man who had entered a few minutes before and was drinking at the bar. Their waiter who was an elegant old fellow stared at this man from the shadows. The man, who looked vaguely familiar to Billy, wore a suit that would have looked somewhat well tailored years ago but had been worn to bagginess. Suddenly the man b
ustled to their table.

  “Billy Creighton! What a thrill to run into you down here. I heard your American Bar Association speech in D.C. last winter. It was on the taxation complications of owning a professional sports team, wasn’t it? And Gwen, are you still ranching? Great food here, right? One thing about my job is I’ve eaten my way around the world a dozen times. I’m Virgil Atkins.”

  The man sat down with authority and rattled on until Billy and Gwen were bug-eyed. Atkins said he had heard that they had flown down in Gwen’s Cessna and that Sam and Patty were here too, but Patty had taken a cab all the way to Tucson. The last detail startled Billy and Gwen.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Billy said, signaling for the check. “We don’t have to listen to this.”

  “I’m here to watch your scumbag friend get put away for life, you might say. I’ve seen him in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, wherever. Now he’s finished and I suspect you’re here to say goodbye. Nothing more, I hope, for your sake.”

  “You’re here to make sure it happens, aren’t you?” Gwen was flushed with anger.

  “You’re a tough one, Gwen. You take a train to L.A. and talk to one of our guys all the way out. He’s a good rummy player, isn’t he? But you don’t really tell him anything. Then you sucker all your soft-core friends into helping you try to spring your terrorist. But now the Mexicans got him without me lifting a hand.”