Dangerous Men Page 8

  “Do you always drink and drive?”

  “Always.”

  She nods, then leans back and kicks her feet up onto the dashboard. “What about your friends? Aren’t they going to wonder where you went?”

  “I doubt it,” he says. “Anyway, we won’t be gone long.”

  She wonders what he means by “I doubt it.”

  There is an access road to the quarry that ends at a locked gate, and they have to leave the car there and climb over. Riggy helps her, putting his hands on her hips and giving her a boost. Then he hands the beers to her and swings himself easily up and over. He tells her they are on private land, and so they keep silent as they walk down the dirt road. Duney’s consciousness is at once numbed and heightened. The trees seem to whisper at her as they catch and release the soft, warm breezes. Riggy, who had seemed so clumsy inside the house, walks with powerful, assured strides. He is in his element out here, or at least he acts like it. Duney has to struggle to keep up.

  When they get to the quarry, he tells her they can make noise. “No one can hear us out here,” he says. “The sound gets trapped.” Around them, blasted granite walls rise, crooked and tall. About ten feet below, a large, dark pool of water reflects the newly risen moon.

  “I didn’t know this was here,” she says.

  “Most people don’t. The ones who do try to keep it a secret.” He sits on a ledge and dangles his feet, then opens himself another beer. When he offers one to her, she refuses. She is feeling a little dizzy.

  “Come here. Have a seat.”

  Duney does so. The odd, shadowy lighting of the place makes her feel as if she is in a movie.

  Before she even realizes it is happening, Riggy is kissing her. For a moment, she lets him, but then she pulls away. “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey what?”

  “Hey cut that out. I’m not some fifteen-year-old groupie. I thought we came out here for a swim.” She is suddenly aware of the vulnerability of her situation. She thinks about Beth Ann telling her to watch out, and how she has done exactly the opposite.

  “Sure, we came out here to swim.” He leans over to kiss her again, and again she pulls away. “What’s the matter?” he says.

  “I don’t know about this.”

  He laughs, stands, and begins unbuttoning his shirt. “It’s dark, and there’s no one going to see you anyway.” He continues to strip until he is down to his underwear, a baggy pair of boxer shorts. Duney stares out over the water, pretending not to watch, but stealing glances at him every now and then. He has a strong, muscled body with an extremely hairy chest and legs. He also has a potbelly, probably from drinking so much beer, and she sees him suck it in to make it less noticeable. There is something incredibly normal about this; she wishes her brother were here to see that guitar players grow older like anyone else. Somewhere below them, a rock drips water slowly into the pool, a quiet, monotonous sound.

  “Well? Are you just going to sit there or what?”

  Standing, she begins to undress, and as she removes each garment, she becomes more and more nervous. When she is down to her underwear, she turns her back to him, feeling tiny and foolish. She wishes she were still at home.

  “Come on,” says Riggy, “Don’t give me this. I didn’t drag you here, you wanted to come. Let’s have some fun. I’ll go first.” He leans forward and dives into the black water. For a moment, Duney is gratefully alone on the ledge. Then he emerges a few yards away, tossing his long hair like a wet dog, blowing water out of his mouth. “It’s great!” he shouts.

  There is a horrible inevitability to all of this, Duney thinks, as hard and unrelenting as the rock ledge beneath her feet. She thinks of Riggy sitting on her parents’ bed and wonders if he might not have been planning to steal the television, rather than watch it. Until she came along and gave him something better to do. It seems entirely possible, but she realizes she’ll never know, and she’s not sure that it matters really, or that she cares. She slips a finger under her bra strap and pulls it up on her shoulder, then, taking a deep breath, dives in. The water is icy cold and has a hard, mineral cleanness to it. When she comes up, Riggy is next to her. He puts a hand out underwater and touches her.

  She splashes water at him and begins to swim away. He starts out after her, and suddenly she is seized by an awful fear, and she swims as hard as she can. She is going to be raped, she thinks, possibly murdered, her body never found out here in this lonely place, and it will be her own fault. Riggy splashes and kicks furiously, but for all his output of energy, he is an inefficient swimmer, and she finds it easy to pull away. Relieved, she allows herself to enjoy the cold smoothness of the water. From the opposite end of the pool he shouts that he will catch her, and she lets him get close before pushing off and moving effortlessly away from him once again. When she has put the distance of the whole pool between them, she does a lazy back stroke. She thinks she has never felt more in control in her life, and she almost wishes it could go on forever, this easy gliding back and forth. The water supports her, caresses her, is in league with all her movements. From the other side, Riggy takes a deep breath and prepares another assault. When he is halfway across, she pushes off, dodges him in the middle, then easily swims past in the other direction.

  She begins to circle the edges of the pool, taking long, powerful strokes, aware all the time of Riggy’s clumsy pursuit. She feels if she wanted to, she could just go on and on and never get tired, that Riggy might drown himself in his own desire and she’d still be going around in circles, even as the sun came up. Behind her, Riggy is shouting something, and she lifts her head out of the water to listen. “Diana,” he yells, “Diana.” Bouncing off the rock walls, his voice seems to come from everywhere at once, even from inside her own head. Taking a deep breath, she continues to swim, but she slows her pace, just enough.

  EL DIABLO DE LA CIENEGA

  The black sports car that pulled up in a puff of dust alongside the La Cienega Community Center looked like a big hand, placed palm down in the red dirt. Ignoring it, Victor kept his feet in front of the chalked line on the cracked concrete. The door clicked open and a very tanned man with straw-colored hair got out, stuck his hands into the pockets of his chinos, and leaned back to watch. No time left on the clock, Spurs down by one. As always, the game had come down to this one deciding moment. Victor made the first shot, then lobbed up the second for the win. There had never really been any doubt. Just for the hell of it, he made them again.

  The late afternoon sun glinted off the broken windshields of a half-dozen wrecked and rusting cars across the road. Beyond them sat nine mobile homes, all in poor repair, set at odd angles to each other. The community center, a square building with flaking yellow stucco and one intact window, sported a tiny sign indicating that it had also once served as the La Cienega Volunteer Fire Department. From the south wall, a faded outline of a mural of the Virgin someone had begun long ago and never finished gazed out, faceless. The building was abandoned but, with the exception of a few weedy cracks in its surface, the basketball court alongside it was still in good shape.

  Victor looked over briefly at the man, then continued shooting. He tossed in seven consecutive baskets before one finally circled the rim and hopped back out.

  “Hope I didn’t make you nervous,” called the man.

  Victor, twelve, had recently experienced a growth spurt that had turned him into a gangly, stretched-out cartoon of what he’d looked like the year before. He was particularly sensitive to criticism. Catching the ball, he responded by spinning around and executing a perfect hook shot that touched nothing but net. He turned and faced the man.

  “Victor Garcia?”

  “Sure,” said Victor.

  “I’ve heard about you.” The man got up from where he was leaning and walked onto the court. He wore a pink LaCoste shirt and Top-Siders. The license plate on his car said Texas. “I like to shoot a little hoop myself now and then. Usually, when I go someplace new, I ask around to find out who�
��s good.”

  Victor eyed him with suspicion, but also a certain amount of pride. It was, after all, about time he got some attention.

  “Fact.”

  “Who’d you ask?”

  He waved his hand in the general direction from which he’d come. “Guy up the road.”

  “Lopez?”

  “I think he said his name was Lopez. What’s the difference? He was right. You’ve got the touch. Not everybody does, you know. Just the right balance of things—you concentrate well, but you’re relaxed, too.”

  Victor glanced across the street, where a tiny dust devil spun in the yard in front of Rodriguez’s place. “What are you, CIA?” he asked.

  The man shook his head and chuckled. “Close, though. FOA. Ferrari Owners of America.”

  “Ferrari? That’s what this is?”

  The man smiled, his lips drawing back to reveal a set of china-white teeth, and waved toward his car. “You have to pass a stupidity test to qualify for one. Getting parts is murder. On my fourth clutch. I’m up here for a convention. Southwest chapter—we’re meeting in Santa Fe this year. I always try to drive around and see the country a little. It’s beautiful out here—all these extinct volcanoes. Kind of violent, if you know what I mean. You’re lucky to live where you do.”

  “I guess,” Victor said, dubiously. He didn’t feel particularly lucky.

  “I mean it. Look around. It’s true what they say about northern New Mexico. There’s a quality to the light. Sky’s as blue as a polished gemstone. What do you all say? ‘The Land of Enchantment?’” He raised his hands as if demonstrating a magic trick, then smiled and indicated that Victor should give him the ball, which he did. He bounced it once, then took a shot—a perfect swish. The hairs on his muscled arms stood high off the skin, making him appear to have a kind of golden aura. Victor retrieved the ball.

  “Nice,” he said, passing it back. Phony as blue macaroni, he thought to himself, which was something Rodriguez liked to say. A hunk of old metal tubing lay on the ground a few feet away, and Victor figured if he needed, he could probably get to it quick enough to inflict some damage.

  The stranger eyed the basket and did it again.

  “Victor Garcia,” he said, walking over to get the ball from the pile of rubble where it had rolled. “Are you a betting man?”

  “I got nothing to bet,” Victor said.

  “That’s OK. We can negotiate. I just think it might be fun to have a little competition—you and me. Friendly.”

  He decided the stranger was harmless. “Free throws?”

  “Maybe. Maybe something a little more challenging.”

  A car came up the road, its muffler dragging noisily on the dirt and gravel. Victor’s mother was returning home from the motel where she changed sheets.

  “I got to go,” Victor said, taking back his ball, though reluctantly. He would have liked to show this man what he could do.

  From his pocket, the man withdrew a black leather wallet, and out of that he took a business card which he handed to Victor. It read: E. Crispin Light, Import/Export.

  “Most of my friends just call me Money,” he said. “It’s my basketball name.”

  “Money?”

  “You know—money in the bank. Kind of like Bill Bradley was ‘Dollar Bill.’”

  Victor looked again at the card. The printing on it was in gold. “What does the E stand for?”

  “Good, good,” said Money, grinning. “Most people don’t even ask. The fact is, it doesn’t stand for anything. I put it on there because I think it looks classy. What do you think?”

  Victor shrugged. Across the road, he could see his mom struggling with groceries. “You coming back?”

  “You bet.” Money looked at his watch. “Tomorrow evening. Will you be here?”

  “I’m always here,” said Victor, coolly.

  “All right. You go on home now and look after your mom.”

  Victor shielded his eyes against a sudden gust of wind that threw a curtain of dust up around them. “What do you know about my mom?”

  “Did I say I knew anything?” He smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Victor.” He shook the boy’s hand. His was hard and calloused as if, even though he appeared to be rich, he still did a fair amount of manual labor. Gardening, maybe, Victor thought. The man got back into his car and drove off in the direction of the setting sun.

  The understanding came to him clearly, in the middle of the night, when he awoke to the sound of his mother’s coughing. This was a nightly occurrence—the luminous readout on his alarm clock said 3:06, and as he lay waiting for the sounds to subside, he was filled with a mixture of fear and pride. He really was good. Not just good the way anyone who practices enough can become good, but special.

  He got up and went into the kitchen to make himself a cocktail, his name for the milk, Nestle’s Quik and raw egg drink he’d invented as part of his personal training regimen. From her bedroom, his mother continued to cough, a deep, body-racking sound that seemed to originate in her stomach and work its way up.

  Taking his drink, he unlocked the door and stepped outside. There were stars everywhere, more than he’d ever seen. In the darkness, the shapes of the wrecked cars were ominous, lurking monsters. Victor walked toward them, if only to prove to himself he wasn’t scared. Something moved on one of the hoods and he halted. Gradually, his eyes became more accustomed to the light and he saw a small lizard. It was watching him.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” he said.

  The lizard did not move. Even out here, the sound of his mother’s hacking was clearly audible, the only disturbance in the night’s solemn quiet.

  “I’m ready to deal,” said Victor. “I know who you are. I know what you want. I’m not afraid. If I lose, you can have my soul, to be damned to eternal hellfire. But if I win, I want you to make my mom OK again.” He paused for a moment, considering whether to throw in something else, too, like a million dollars, or a starting position with the San Antonio Spurs, but it seemed to him that if he were fighting the forces of darkness, it would be best to keep his own motives as pure and true as possible. “Tomorrow,” he said. “Sundown.”

  The lizard continued to look at him. Then, to Victor’s astonishment, it nodded its head once and scurried away.

  As he passed his mother’s door on his way back to bed, Victor stopped and whispered, “It’s all right. I’m taking care of everything.”

  But E. Crispin Light did not appear the next evening. Victor spent over two hours on the basketball court, dribbling, shooting, working on the basics, keeping his eye out for the black sports car. It was too bad, because his shooting was dead accurate—he hit nineteen out of twenty from the free throw line. He felt certain he could have beaten all comers, even an emissary from the Prince of Darkness. Eventually, as the light began to fade, he put his ball under one arm and walked home.

  His mother was watching Wheel of Fortune.

  “If only I could spell a little better,” she lamented. “I’d go to Hollywood and clean up on this game.” She held a small clay pot in one hand, a paintbrush in the other. She picked up extra money painting Anasazi designs onto local pottery for sale to tourists. She was very pale. Victor’s father had been Mexican, but his mother was from California, a thin woman of Irish extraction, with large, sad eyes. Though she’d been sick-now on and off for the better part of a year, she refused to go to a doctor. They had no insurance. Her one gesture toward her health had been to quit smoking, but it had only seemed to make the coughing worse. She held out a pot. “Want to try one?”

  Victor shook his head. “I’m thinking,” he said.

  “What you need is some friends,” she said. “You spend too much time alone.”

  “I don’t need no friends,” he said.

  “Any. ‘I don’t need any friends.’” She raised her eyebrows, then drew a line around the lip of the vase. “Alabaster caught a lizard this morning. Tore the poor thing to bits.”

  Victor swallowed ha
rd. “A lizard?”

  “You know. One of those grayish ones.”

  Alabaster, who was part Persian, lay in the windowsill, cleaning her paws. Victor stared at her, trying to see if she looked any different. After all, he reasoned, it might have been any lizard.

  “Are you all right?” asked his mother. “You look a little pale.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Oh, on a scale of one to ten, today was about a four, I’d say.”

  “It’s going to get better,” he told her. Then he excused himself and went to his room.

  ———

  The plaza in Santa Fe was filled with Ferraris, all of them polished to a radiance, reflecting sunlight, smelling richly of gasoline and leather. They were arranged by year and model—scores of them parked side to side, their owners hovering about, keeping a wary eye out for people who might ignore the “Do Not Touch” signs in their windshields. Victor locked his bicycle and wandered among the automobiles, looking for one in particular. After making almost a complete circuit of the plaza, he found it, wedged in among six others of exactly the same style, but the only black one with Texas plates. He looked around for Money, but he was not in the immediate area. Victor peered in, cupping his hands to the tinted glass, half-expecting to see a dance of writhing, tortured souls. The inside did look like another world, but only a wealthy one. The control panel was polished walnut, the seats a deep, red leather. There was a Willie Nelson cassette in the tape deck, a New Mexico highway map on the dashboard. A little disappointed, he stuck his hands in his pockets and turned.

  “Hello, Victor.” For a Texan, Money had almost no accent at all. He wore sunglasses and a maroon golf shirt.

  “What happened?” said Victor. “You didn’t come.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. We had a big dinner at the hotel and it got late. I’ll make it up to you.”

  Victor tried to seem as though he didn’t care. “You’re the one wanted to come and shoot.”