Fifty Grand

And he did frighten me. Why was he at the garage? Why was he looking into the accident? What was his angle? Something Ricky missed?

“Worry not, little rabbit. He is nothing. If this were Mexico I would deal with him, but here…” Esteban muttered and waved his hand in the air with contempt.

“He seems to have a finger in a lot of pies,” I asked, probing perhaps too hard. Esteban glanced at me, took another sip of tequila. His eyes narrowed a little and even Paco gave me a second look.

Too many questions.

I played meek, eating, looking down at my plate. I tuned out as the boys talked soccer. Esteban swallowed tequila, two shots for every one of ours.

Finally he stopped eating, banged the table with the flat of his hand, looked at me, time traveled back to the end of our conversation.

“No, don’t worry about him. He thinks he’s a player. He thinks he runs this town. If truth be told, it’s me-I run it. He doesn’t know half of what’s going on. Not half of it. Motherfucker, he’ll get his one day, you’ll see. You’ll see.”

His eyes dark, violent.

I thought about his Range Rover.

Of course, as Ricky pointed out, if you were very stupid, or very bold, you could hit a man, kill him, and never bother to get the car repaired at all, just drive around without a care in the world, knowing that up here the life of a dead Mex wasn’t worth a goddamn thing.

Esteban swallowed the last of his steak, smacked his lips. His cheeks were red, his face puffed.

I switched the conversation back to sports and Esteban tried to explain the difference between rugby and American football. Of all the subjects I wasn’t interested in, this proved to be near the top.

Time dragged.

When he was finished with his meal Paco thanked me solicitously and gave Esteban such a black look that despite his mood he remembered his manners. “Oh, this was perfect, María, thank you so much for making it for us,” he said. “There’s nothing like good food to raise your spirits.”

“It’s just something I threw together,” I replied, finding that I wasn’t immune to the compliment.

“No, no, it was delicious,” Esteban replied.

We had no sweetmeats but we had cigarettes and the rest of the tequila.

We moved together to the upstairs balcony of the motel.

Esteban stared at us and shook his head. “They didn’t trust you. Too new. Fuckers. Ungrateful fuckers. I’ll show them,” he said, and he stomped off to his suite at the east end of the motel.

“He’s drunk,” I said to Paco.

“No, he can hold it better than that,” he replied.

But either I was right or Esteban had serious mental problems, because a couple of minutes later he came out of his room with a hunting rifle. He shot it into the woods half a dozen times yelling Chinga tu madre and other obscenities, and when he tired of that he went into his room and turned on his Mexican polka music at full blast, singing along, shouting the lyrics over the desultory sound of electric accordions.

“This place is messed up. We should have gone to L.A. with the others,” Paco said sadly.

“You should have gone, I need to be here,” I replied.

Paco looked at me for a long time. He could sense that I was keeping something back. “Tell me,” he said, at last.

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said weakly.

“Oh, I know this one,” Paco said.

I listened to the tune but I didn’t recognize it.

“I don’t know it.”

“Really? It’s called ‘Ghost Dance,’ it’s very popular. It’s about the Day of the Dead,” Paco said, giving me another skeptical look.

“Blood and death! Blood and death!” Esteban was shouting until he grew hoarse.

Eventually the tape stopped and someone helped Esteban into bed.

The clouds cleared. Mars rose between the branches of a blue spruce, and after Mars, Venus and then the big glassy seashore of stars, the Via Lactea.

“Hell with this, let’s go to bed,” I muttered.

Paco smiled.

“Separately,” I clarified.

“Of course,” he replied with an even bigger smile.

But neither of us moved.

We sat there, smoking, listening to the silence and gazing at the Milky Way.

It was quiet now and I felt strangely at ease here in the town where my father had found comfort and lived and loved. “It won’t last,” I said.

“It never does,” Paco said.

It never does because waiting in the wings are blood and death.

“Blood and death,” I whispered, and Paco grinned.

9 THE MEN FROM SASKATCHEWAN

Esteban prodded me awake at four-thirty in the morning. “Can you drive a car?” he asked.

“Wha?”

Paco woke on the other bed. “I can drive,” he said.

Esteban shook his head. “No, we need you at the construction site. We’re against a deadline there. We get penalized a thousand dollars a day if we’re not finished by Christmas. The Ortegas going to L.A. has really screwed us.”

“Yeah, I can drive,” I said.

“Good, come on, let’s go.”

“What time is it?”

“Come on.”

“At least let me go to the bathroom.”

“Hurry.”

In five minutes we were outside in the Range Rover. Esteban’s right arm was in a homemade sling.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Drive downtown, we’ll swing by Starbucks, it opens at five.”

“And then where to?”