His family was moving away.
I don't know why I was so sure they were moving out of town. Maybe because I knew they knew I'd find him if They lived anywhere in the same town. I felt a deep sense of peace.
And just like that, it ended.
The shoulder healed in live weeks.
In eight they let me back into school.
Around the house the subject was never mentioned.
In a year I think everyone had honestly forgotten.
Except me.
I made El Paso the first night.
Highway 20 through Mesa, Safford, and Duncan in Arizona brought me to Lordsburg, New Mexico. Between Safford and Duncan the desert is for real. The stark, multi-colored rock and sand of buttes and coulees grimly overshadow the sparse greenery of saguaro cactus, mesquite, and palos verde.
Highways 70* and 80 join up at Lordsburg and run together through Deming to Las Cruees. I turned south there on 80 to El Paso. The temperature when I left Phoenix had been eighty-five. Rolling past the railroad-marshaling yards in El Paso, there was a flurry of snow in the headlights. Altitude makes a difference. The odometer on the Ford said 409 miles when I pulled into a motel on the east side of town.
I'd pushed it a bit to make El Paso. I had a reason. I had to get my arm attended to before the bandage became a part of the tissue. I knew where I could get it cared for, no questions asked, across the International Bridge in Juarez.
The motel office had signs at the front desk advertising fabulous guided tours of the fabulous city of Ciudad Juarez in fabulous Old Mexico. I had them call the agency, and in thirty minutes a potbellied little Mex showed up to guide me. He was about thirty-five, with the eyes of a well-fed weasel. Six dollars changed hands, and we took off in his car.
He was a cheerful talker. Compulsive, almost. He had been baptized Jaime Carlos Torreon Garcia, he told me, but his friends called him Jimmy. He worked for Pan Am in El Paso, but lived in Juarez. He guided nights and weekends. Would I care to see the most excellent Mexican filigreed silver, handworked? I regretted that on Mexican filigreed handworked silver I was loaded. Jimmy was too old a hand at the game even to look disappointed at my turndown.
It was a twenty-minute ride from the motel to the bridge. On the way across it, Jimmy had a sparkling remark for everyone at the check-in stations—English for the US customs men, Spanish for the Mexican soldiers. No one bothered to look at me. With the number of trips Jimmy made over that bridge, he was better known than the president of the country. Either country.
The fabulous city of Ciudad Juarez was—as always— dirty, dusty, and squalid. Except when it rained, and then it was muddy beyond belief. Mexican authorities show a reluctance to put drains in their streets. God sends the rain and the mud, and God will take it away.
My mentor headed unerringly for a bar. "My friend," he told me, with an encompassing wave of his hand at the swarthy, shock-headed proprietor. "He has the finest cantina in the old town."
I looked around at the empty booths and flyspecked walls. "He's not a relative?" I asked Jimmy.
"A cousin," he admitted blandly. Since I so obviously knew the rules of the road, he sat down and ordered Canadian Club for us both without consulting my taste in the matter.
"Have a couple," I told him. "Take your time. I'm going to walk around to the Street of Girls."
He slid from his stool immediately. "I must go with you," he protested. "Or they will cheat you, amigo."
"I'm the bashful type, Jaime Carlos," I said. "I'll go it alone. I'll pay your commission just like you'd get it from the house." He eyed me doubtfully but returned to his Canadian Club.
Out on the street I side-doored it a couple of times to make sure lie wasn't following me. I couldn't see any sign of him, although probably half the Mexican population shared his silhouette. I hadn't been in Juarez in years, but I knew where I wanted to go. I turned up the third street on the left. The side street's macadam ended ten yards from the intersection, and the sidewalk vanished. I stepped down eight inches onto an earthen footpath.
I found the old woman's place with no trouble. I recognized the partly rusted-away iron fence around the scruffy, postage-stamp-sized front yard. The last time I was here, Ed Morris had been with me. Ed had been pushing up daisies for quite a while now. He'd never learned to keep his mouth shut in a strange bar.
I In old woman looked me over through a hole in the door panel when I knocked. I don't know what she thought she saw, but she opened the door. There was no conversation. She tested the bill I gave her under three different lights while I removed my shirt. Her fat hand then made a swooping movement somewhere inside her clothes, and the bill disappeared.
She hummed a tuneless monotone while she worked on the arm. I'd been afraid she might have to steam the old bandage free or use ether, but she cut it carefully in several places and worked it loose. She knew her business. It wasn't a painless operation, but considering the length of time the wound had gone unattended it went a damn sight easier than I expected.
I looked at the wound while she prepared a new bandage. A beauty contest queen might have hollered foul, but it was healing. The new bandage was smaller and less bulky, and so easier to hide. The woman never spoke while she applied it. The last time I'd been there she'd looked three years older than the Archangel Michael, and she'd found no Fountain of Youth in the meantime.
Outside again I headed back to the main street. I turned automatically for a look behind me as I stepped back up on the sidewalk. A dim street light away I saw a figure of Jimmy's general dimensions. I stepped into a doorway and gave the half-seen figure a chance to catch up, but nobody passed. It bothered me. I used my handkerchief to wipe the red dust of the earthen path from my shoes, then walked back to the cantina.
Jaime Cargos Torreon Garcia wasn't there.
His cousin, the bushy-haired proprietor, looked surprised to see me again so quickly. "No sport?" he inquired.
"No sportsman," I answered. "Too old, I guess."
"It comes to all of us," he philosophized, but he crossed himself against the approach of the evil day.
Jimmy bustled in die front door. He, too, seemed surprised to see me. His well-managed expressions of sympathy for my supposed lack of success would have gone down better if I hadn't seen the thick coating of red dust on his shoes.
I tossed a bill down on the bar and hustled him out of there before he could speak. Whatever he knew, it was going to stay with him. Let the cousin believe my sudden exit to be the frustrated petulance of a sexual loser. Cousin Jimmy had acquired dangerous knowledge. Dangerous for him.
We got into his car while he kept shooting nervous little glances at me. If he had information, I was sure he didn't know what to do with it. He needed to put his head together with someone and plan a financial coup based on his knowledge of the gringo's movements. Jaime Carlos Torreon Garcia had the proper piratical instincts but a serious deficiency in his operating procedure. And he wasn't going to live long enough to improve it.
"I think I've had enough sightseeing," I said, turning toward him. I drew the Woodsman, and his eyes popped like a frog's on a hot rock. "Drive up to the checkout zone. Tell them 'no purchases' in Spanish. Nothing more. Let's hear you say it.
"No compra," he said huskily.
"That's all you'll say," I warned. "Let's go."