The prisión was a rhomboid made out of yellow sandstone behind a tall chain fence. There were metal guard turrets and gimbal lights at each corner and guards were conspicuous behind the windows and on the walls. From the highway approaching Animas Trujano you could see a high, red safe-box building inside with long low buildings connected like spokes. On top of the safe-box was a transmitter tower with a red slogan light, and beside it a copter pad slash-marked H. It was the most single-minded piece of construction he had ever seen, and from outside it was inconceivable that men were in it and that more men got put in it every day. It would refute something basic in you, Quinn thought, to be put inside. And so of course there wouldn’t be any extremes beyond consideration to getting yourself out.
In Animas Trujano the whores weren’t up yet. Portieres hung over their entries, though the doors to the mescalerías had been opened and green candles were already twitching inside. There were no moms and dads today and the town seemed inert and passed over. A Zapotec boy riding a bicycle flocked with wads of white cotton rode up the street against the direction of the car, followed by a dog, and there was a group of men standing beside an old green Impala that had crapped out in the middle of the street. Their heads were under the hood, and one pair of legs sprouted out into the strong sunlight. The boy seemed to be riding away from them.
“Mexican men either work on their cars or piss,” Quinn said as the Chevy came up.
Bernhardt didn’t answer. He took a black pistol from under his jacket and put it in a space beneath the dash. Bernhardt had on a beige Italian suit, something, Quinn thought, you’d have to go a long way for. It made its own statement. “Maybe you should carry a gun,” Bernhardt said. The boy on the bicycle waved as he pedaled past. “If you smell extinction,” Bernhardt said appraisingly, “it maybe comes closer to you.”
“I can’t smell it,” Quinn said.
“But you do.” Bernhardt looked at him. “You are alone, that is detestable. Your wife is making you nervous now. So it scares you somehow, maybe.”
“Not me,” he said and looked at Bernhardt. “I was in the war. I don’t get scared anymore. It’s my big problem.”
“Then you are lucky,” Bernhardt said. He made the turn toward the prisión. He was silent for a moment. “Too many things scare me anymore. Too many things are to be afraid of.”
“You’re all loaded up though,” Quinn said, pointing toward the gun. “Just stay between me and them.”
“You may need to be close, though, before we’re finished.” Bernhardt attended the road carefully as it approached the fenced perimeter of the prison. There were soldiers and army police standing in groups on the inside of the fence and a brand new APC in front of the main gate with another sixty caliber podded on a truck bed. The soldiers stared at the car casually as if it made an uninteresting noise they had nothing better to do than identify.
“Just lay it all out for me so I can see it,” Quinn said. He felt aggressive all at once. The prison made him alert, and that was the way he wanted to stay, alert to everything. “I like to be able to see everything when I do it.”
“Maybe it will all please you,” Bernhardt said.
Quinn glanced out at the yellow stone wall of the prison. It was long enough that at any one location you had no sense of there being an end to it. “I’d like to be pleased,” he said. “It would be a real fucking experience.”
3
IN VIETNAM Quinn had made a minor science of light-study. Light made all the difference in the way you performed and how you made out, since everything was a matter of seeing and not seeing. The right distribution of eastern grey and composite green on the surface of an empty paddy and a line of coconut palms could give you a loop, and for a special celestial moment you wouldn’t be there at all, but be out of it, in an evening’s haze of beach on Lake Michigan with teals like flecks of grey space skittering down the flyway toward Indiana, and the entire day would back up sweetly against a heavy wash of night air. And you could put it away then, ease your eyes, and wander outside another moment and join the world before the landscape began to function again as a war zone.
Mexicans all had faith that rooms needed lights, though they didn’t have a systematic canon for where they went. Preference was for a single flo-ring bracketed midceiling, giving off just enough radiance to taint the air with an ugly graininess that seemed to hold bad smells, but wasn’t quite good enough to see by. The effect in all cases was of no light, though there was always the illusion of light that made you look too hard at everything, and at the end of any day made your eyes smart and water from wanting to see better than you could ever see. It made you feel dirty in a way that wouldn’t clean. It made all the daylight prospects seem jeopardized.
The visiting room had a poor light. The space was a long cafeteria, twenty-five by forty, inside one of the low pavilions chained to the administración safe-box. There had been a row of high casements down the long walls, but they had been bricked and florings installed. Quinn thought it might have been usable once, but it gave you a sharp retinal pressure that made you unsure moment to moment if you could distinguish correct figure from absolute ground. And he liked to be surer than that.
They had to wait for Sonny. The cafeteria was cool and quiet. There were patches of seepage on the concrete and armies of moyote beetles crawling out of the wall cracks, heading for the seepage so they could get in it and get on their backs and drown. The air had the thick sweet smell of burned cinnamon, and there were two brown-uniformed guards at either end with long rifles, watching an American prisoner whispering intensely to a woman across one of the long tables. He hated the room. It smelled like piss-stink Michigan grade-school cafeterias that made you gutsick and think life was shitty. The room was full of flies, though they didn’t seem to bother Bernhardt. He was captured by the woman the American prisoner was talking to.
Sonny was let in the yellow metal door at the end of the cafeteria. The guard halted him, put his rifle against the wall, and patted Sonny down while Sonny stared into the room and smiled, his long fingers sensing the new air.
Sonny had been good hoops. He was six three and soft-palmed and ball smart, and at a distance he didn’t look like somebody muling Baranquilla cocaine through Mexico into San Diego. He had once scored 100 points in a high-school game in New Rochelle, which was a state record, and when Quinn showed up a month ago, he looked like he could still do it, though he didn’t look that good anymore. He had gone to J.C. and quit to play pro, then gotten waived and wound up playing in Sweden for two hundred dollars a game. He had come back in a year with a Benzedrine problem and a Swedish wife and begun playing I. leagues in L.A. and got into the business of delivering animal tranquilizers to the dog tracks in Tijuana for fixed rates. He was just starting to move lorazepam when Quinn had moved with Rae to Seal Beach two years ago, and even then muling didn’t seem like a job you’d retire from. Sonny had floating, graceful arms and pale eyes that faked his moves and a way of walking toes-in that made you think he wouldn’t go anyplace very fast, which was wrong. He had dropped thirty pounds in a month, his complexion had grown speed bumps, his eyes had gotten wide, and he had begun to tie his hair in a ponytail. He looked to Quinn like a freak, somebody you wouldn’t stop for on the on-ramp.