Fifty Grand

Angela shook her head and dissolved in the lotus light. “It’s not just that Esteban pays shit and he’s unreliable. He drinks and he has a gun and he deals drugs.”

Paco looked at me with stupid, tired eyes. “What are you going to do, María?” he asked.

I was dead tired too. I didn’t want to make a thing of it.

“I’m staying,” I said simply.

The Volkswagen microbus honked its horn. Luisa slid open the side door and waved to hurry us up. I acknowledged her wave and shook my head.

“I don’t know,” Paco said.

“We’d like you to come,” Angela said, touching him on the arm.

“Jualo and all my crew are at the other motel on I-70, some of them are in Denver, are you gonna take those guys?” Paco asked.

Angela shook her head. “We’ve got room for two more. Come with us, Francisco. Come on, we want to have you, things will be better in L.A., please come,” Angela insisted.

She hadn’t begged me this much. She liked him. She was a sensible girl. She’d be good for him.

“Listen to her. You should go, Paco, you’ll have more opportunities in Los Angeles,” I said.

“But Esteban’s done so much for us,” he replied lamely.

“Fuck Esteban,” Angela muttered.

The VW honked again.

“Vamonos!” someone shouted.

“Well?” Angela asked.

“How far is L.A.?” Paco wondered.

Angela shrugged. “L.A.? I think it’s just over the mountains. A few hours. Not far. Not very far.”

“Do you have a map?” Paco asked.

Angela was getting impatient. “I don’t know. L.A. is huge. You can’t miss it. You just keep going west.”

Paco looked at me. It was hard, if not impossible, to read him but I had a stab: “Francisco, my friend, my brother, do not feel that you have an obligation to stay here because of me. I am able to look after myself,” I said in formal Spanish.

He grinned. “María, that I know only too well. But we’ve been through a lot together and I don’t want to go anywhere without you,” he said, and his eyes flicked down to the motel parking lot to cover his embarrassment.

“You could make a lot more money in L.A.,” I tried.

“So could you.”

Angela spat. “You’re both crazy,” she muttered. “Come on, I need an answer.”

“I’m not going,” I said.

“Me either,” Paco agreed.

Angela nodded. “Well, it’s your funeral,” she said in English.

I hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. Paco hugged her. She ran across the parking lot and Luisa helped her into the VW.

They waved as they drove out, honking the horn and flashing the lights like they were going to a fair, which I suppose they were, after this shitty town.

Lucky they left when they did. Twenty minutes after they made the highway Esteban’s Range Rover pulled in.

Paco and I retreated to the kitchen to prepare dinner but one of Esteban’s remaining goons must have told him what had happened, because soon after we heard him yelling and screaming and running from room to room to see who was missing. When he found us in the kitchen he wasn’t relieved, he was pissed off. “They didn’t want you? What’s your fucking problem?” he demanded.

“Watch your language, there’s a lady present,” Paco said.

Esteban snorted, glared at us, and then left without saying anything more.

“Dinner?” Paco asked.

“I’ll make something,” I said, more than happy, again, to cook for someone else. For a man.

I opened the freezer and found strip steak. I fried it in garlic and olive oil.

We could still hear Esteban outside yelling and ranting like a child but we ignored him. In another pan I fried squash and plantains. Paco put on the rice.

He cut me two kiwifruits and an orange.

The juice ran over his fingers and for a moment I wanted him to feed me the fruit from his sticky hands. His hair had fallen over his face again and he smelled of pine and sun.

I took a beer from the fridge and pressed it against my forehead and asked him to set the table.

There were at least a score of other people in the motel at that moment and most of them worked for Esteban, but even so, for some reason, when he’d calmed down he came back to us.

He was carrying a bottle of tequila and three glasses.

“Excuse me,” he said when he saw that we were eating.

“Pull up a chair,” Paco said.

“Join us,” I agreed.

I halved my steak and gave him rice and a tortilla.

He poured three measures of tequila.

“Salud,” he muttered.

We knocked back the tequila and Esteban refilled our glasses.

“Eat something,” I said.

He ate. “Not bad,” he admitted.

“How are you doing after this morning?” I asked him.

Esteban grunted and told Paco an abbreviated and much more heroic account of this morning’s episode with the sheriff.

“Sheriff seems to have a lot of power around here,” I said.

“Don’t worry about him. I have him in my pocket. He’s a fool, he acts big but he has the brain of a cow.”

“I heard some of the guys say he was in the war. He was in Iraq,” Paco said.

“No, no, not this war, the first one. He was in the Marines. He was in Kuwait. Not this one,” Esteban said with a dismissive sniff.

“He is a frightening man,” I found myself saying.