“Buenas tardes.”
“Buenas tardes,” I said.
He asked to know where we were from, and I told him.
“Ah, Tejas,” he said. He looked at LQ and said that a blond gringo certainly had a good reason for not speaking Spanish. Then looked at me again and said anybody who looked Mexican and could speak Spanish as well as I did could be forgiven for having gringo eyes. But what he was curious about, he said, turning to Brando, was why a guy who looked so fucking Mexican couldn’t speak Spanish well enough to ask for a cold beer.
“Eres un pinche pocho, verdad?”
The vaquero was looking for a fight but he badly underestimated Brando’s readiness to give it to him. The insult was barely off the guy’s tongue before Ray brought his knee up into his balls and hit him in the mouth with the bottle of beer. Glass shattered and beer sprayed and the vaquero went down on his ass and over on his side, drawing his knees up and clutching his crotch. He puked through his broken teeth.
The cantinero started to sidestep down the bar but LQ already had the .380 in his hand and waggled it at him, and the barman brought his hands up in view and stepped away from the counter. The two at the end of the bar stood gawking. The pair at the table were beaming at the entertainment.
LQ put up his pistol and leaned over the bar to peer into the shelf under it and came up with a cutoff single-barrel sixteen-gauge. The cantinero looked apologetic. LQ opened the breech and took out the shell and flung it across the room, then stood the shotgun against the front of the bar.
“Let’s get a move on,” I said.
“Gimme another beer,” Brando said to the cantinero. “For the busted one.”
“Mándame?”
“Dale otra cerveza,” I said.
He went to the cooler and fetched three beers to the bar.
“Put them in a bag,” Brando said.
“Cómo?”
“Ponlas en una bolsa,” I said.
He looked around and found a paper sack and put the bottles in it. Brando picked it up and carried it out under his arm.
LQ and I paused at the door and eyeballed everybody in the room. I didn’t think any of them was likely to discuss us with the police. We went out the door and down the street to the car. Brando already had the engine running. We got in and he drove us off nice and easy and I gave him the directions out of town.
When we got on the open road, I opened the beers and passed them around and we took a few pulls without talking until LQ said, “You getting awful thin-skinned, aint you, Ramon? All the fella called you was a phony Mexican.”
He leaned so that Brando couldn’t see his face in the rearview and he gave me a wink.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Jimmy,” LQ said, “but aint that what pocho means—a phony Mex? A Mexican who talks and acts American?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
Brando kept his eyes on the road, steering with one hand and holding his beer with the other, but he was still pretty tight about the whole business—you could see it in his jaw and how he was gripping the wheel.
“I mean, you’re all the time saying you aint Mexican, no matter how much you look it, always saying how you were born in the States and all,” LQ said. “Seems to me he was saying the same thing. So what’s there to get blackassed about?”
“It’s how he said it,” Brando said.
“How he said it? Goddamn, you bust up a man ’cause you don’t like how he says something? Woooo, you even thinner in the skin than I thought.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Brando said.
“Ah, Ramon,” LQ said with the usual big sigh, “if only I could. I’d be doing it with—”
“You’d be doing it with a dumb-ass redneck nobody but you can stand,” Ray said.
I smiled out at the road.
“Well golly gee, aint we in a mood?”
“Mood this,” Brando said—then caught sight of LQ’s grin in the mirror and couldn’t restrain his own.
Pretty soon they were talking about how they couldn’t wait to see Sheila and Cora Ann again and how much the girls would like it if they took them some Mexican sandals, maybe a sombrero.
“Hell, Kid,” LQ said to me, “you and your chiquita—we oughta call her Danny—you and Danny ought to come over and join us for a backyard barbecue or something.”
“Damn right,” Brando said. “I think we oughta do it as soon as we get back home.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
We didn’t see anything but desert for the next hour and a half and then came to a wide spot in the road taken up with a few weathered shacks and a one-pump filling station and a tiny café with an open wall and a pair of bench tables. The guy who filled our tank said there wasn’t so much as another hut, never mind a place to get gas or a bite to eat, between there and Escalón, 165 miles away. We went to the café and had pork tacos and beer, then got back in the Hudson and drove on.
We were pushing deep into nowhere, just like it looked on the map, and the road got worse. It was full of cracks and potholes and the Hudson sometimes thumped into one so hard it was a wonder we didn’t blow a tire. The gas-pump guy had said we were lucky to be making this drive in the good weather of the year, that the heat of summer was unbearable, but even now you could see heat waves where the highway met the horizon.
We rolled through a vast pale desert of scraggly brush and rocky outcrops and long red mesas. Far to the southwest black thunderheads sparked with silent lightning and dragged purple veils of rain over the jagged ranges on the horizon. We saw no other living thing but a pair of vultures circling high over the sunlit wasteland to the north.
“Jesus,” Brando said. “Where the hell are we?”
“I believe we took a wrong turn and come to the moon,” LQ said. He reached over to the front seat and got the hand-drawn map from beside me and sat back and opened it.
“According to this,” he said, “that hacienda place is straight thataway”—he pointed south—“about thirty–forty miles.”
“I know it,” I said. “But there’s no way to get there except by way of the Escalón road—and that’s…what…twice as long, all told?”
“At least that, according to this map. Fella sure lives out of the way, don’t he? Say, what’s this here, where the river runs out?”
LQ leaned over the seat to point out the little clump of penciled tufts labeled “ciénaga” just north of the hacienda.
“Sort of a swamp,” I said. “This close to the desert it’s probably just a mud patch.”
I didn’t say much for a while after that—just smoked and stared out at the passing landscape. I couldn’t have explained it, but there was something about this country that pulled at me. In some inexplicable way it felt like a place I’d once known but had forgotten all about.
The sun was almost down to the ridge of distant mountains in the west and glaring hard against the windshield when the road angled off to southward. The map showed the angle and we calculated that we were less than forty miles from Escalón.
And then, shortly after dark, the road ended at a junction with another highway and we were there.
Escalón was nothing but a tiny railstation and a small rocky cemetery and a dozen scattered houses along a single dirt street. No motor vehicles. No telephone or even a telegraph line.
The road ran north to Jiménez and south to Torreón, which lay even farther away. The fat creamy moon had just risen over the black mountains. A light wind kicked up and carried the smell of charcoal cooking. A dog barked and barked but hung back in the shadows beside the depot. The station door was open and showed soft yellow light. A man in a rail agent’s cap stepped into the doorway and peered out at us.