The Second Saladin - Страница 25

Oh, Jesus, it felt good.

He swallowed, licked his lips.

“Anita make you real happy. There’s a nice hole for you — take your choice.”

Trewitt glanced about. Speight had vanished.

Trewitt thought, Well, if he needed me he would have gotten me, right? He just disappeared. What am I supposed to do now?

“Baby, we can do anything. Anything,” she whispered. “I treat you real good. I make you real happy.”

Oh, Jesus! Trewitt fought until he felt quite noble and then surrendered to his darker self meekly, without a whimper.

“Upstairs,” he croaked.

“Anita must wash your thing. It’s the rule,” she said.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Thing, she called it. He winced.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice so quiet he had trouble hearing it himself. He tried to relax on the small cot but looked up to a Day-Glo Virgin on black velvet. It was only one of several religious gimcracks strewn and taped about the room: pictures, little painted statues, crucifixes. Was this some kind of shrine? His pants, meanwhile, were bunched around his knees, although he still wore his coat and tie and shirt; and a man with a coat and tie on whose balls are hanging out feels sublimely ridiculous. He gripped his wallet in his right hand.

Oh, this is a rotten idea. This is a really rotten idea. You ought to get out of here. You just ought to get the hell out of here. But he could not figure out how, and besides he’d already paid.

No door, of course. What did he expect, a Holiday Inn, complete with shower and Magic Fingers vibrator under the bed? Only a curtain sealed the dim little room off from the corridor and although the lights were low, the traffic in the hall was considerable. A regular rush hour. Now and then a peal of Mexican laughter would rise through the odor of disinfectant — it smelled like a hospital up here — and a man would swagger down the hall.

“I be back, baby,” Anita said.

She dipped out the curtain and returned in a moment, holding a wash basin brimming with soapy water and a rough cloth.

“Rub-a-dub-dub,” Trewitt joked bleakly.

She began to scrub him. She rubbed and wiped and grated without mercy to cleanse his tender equipment and though he had not been exactly fierce with desire in the preceding few moments, under this humbling assault he felt himself shrinking ever further.

“Be careful,” he complained. Was she trying to erase it?

“It’s nice, baby,” she said. “It’s not real big or nothing, but it’s real good shaped, and clean. And gringos been trimmed.”

Trewitt smiled tightly at this wonderful compliment.

She dried him roughly and then pulled back in triumph, flipping the towel into the hall, where it swirled to the floor.

She stood above him, an absurdly plump woman of nearly thirty-five, in a cheesy dress, all cleavage and density, an infinity of circles, globs, undulating horizons. She smiled hideously. Backing off, she reached down for her own hem, grabbed it and peeled upward, the dress constricting her flesh as it was yanked until she popped it off with a final tug and stood in cotton drawers, great gushy, floppy breasts with those enormous dark nipples wobbling across her front.

Now she’d step from those drawers next — panties was too modest a word for a garment of such magnitude — and a part of him was disgusted and debased, while at the same time another part, recovering, became entranced. She knelt to divest herself of the drawers, pivoting to deposit the huge filmy things on the table under the Day-Glo Virgin, and turned to face him, her bush a blot of darkness that seemed to separate her bulging belly from her thunderous thighs, without which the whole mass would collapse upon itself.

Yet the very peculiarity of the image — a huge Mexican prostitute standing above his pale gringo body, ribsy and stark — commandeered his imagination. The contrasts were vast and enticing: her hugeness, his frailty; his reluctance, her greed; her expertise, his clumsiness; his repression, her earthiness. His penis picked itself up in salute to the intensity of the moment.

“The mouth,” he commanded hoarsely.

She knelt, obedient to his wishes.

Speight waited out back, beyond the sewer, in the yard of the shop called Argentina. He could smell the sewer, the suffocatingly dense odor of human waste, and hear water trickling through it. It was quiet here in the junky, walled yard but beyond, on the street, he could see whores prowling in the pools of light from the intermittent overhead lamps. The old fieldman in him looked for escape routes, just in case; but there were no escape routes, no real ones. Sure, he could hit the wall if things turned ugly, but at his age there was no way he’d scale ten feet of brick if somebody was shooting at him. So it was a simple, no-option proposition: he was lucky or he was not lucky.

He knew he should have briefed the boy — what was his name? It escaped him for just a moment: Trewitt, Trewitt. But Speight never knew what to say to such youngsters — there were so many of them these days, and he knew they thought him an old fart, long out of it, a relic, an antique. And what could the boy have done anyway? Covered him? With what? No, he would have complained and groused and second-guessed. Trewitt filled Speight with depression. If he was the future, the future was bleak. Speight didn’t think Trewitt would work out.

He glanced at his watch. Oscar Meza had said fifteen minutes and twenty had passed. Speight coughed nervously, picked some scum off his lips, and wished they’d get there.

Five hundred dollars.

That’s what it would cost for a chat with Reynoldo Ramirez, a chat with a dead man.

Oscar Meza, proprietor of Oscar’s, formerly El Palacio, had wanted a thousand. Speight had thought more in terms of $300. Five hundred was all right, though he knew he’d have a tough time sailing it by Yost Ver Steeg if he didn’t come up with something nice and solid. In the old days there was always enough money. You wanted it, you got it. No questions asked. In those days the outfit went full-out, first-class. Now, nickels and dimes and young smart kids who thought you belonged in a museum or a paperback novel. He knew he thought too frequently about the old days. Now —

The car swung into the yard. Speight crouched, watching. It was an old Chevy, a ’58 or ’59, rusted out badly. There must have been thousands of them in Nogales, rotting Mex cars, with broken windows and lead-painted fenders and doors from other vehicles.

Come on. Let’s go, thought Speight.

The driver killed the engine. It died with a gasp and the car ticked hotly for several seconds. Speight could see the two men scanning the yard. They couldn’t see him behind these crates. He could just sit there. It wasn’t too late to forget it.

But he knew he couldn’t forget the $500.

The $500 was now running the show.

Oh, hell, Speight thought.

He stood, stepped out.

“Over here, amigos,” he called.

Now he was finished. He’d done it, or rather, had it done. He remembered similar moments from books — Rabbit Angstrom rising from the whore Ruth, Stingo from his Sophie — but they were no help at all. His experience was of a different denomination, with fat Anita on a dirty bed on a sticky floor in a room that smelled of Lysol, under the eye of a glowing Virgin. Yet he felt rather good. In fact he was astounded by his bliss. The actual moment, the actual ultimate instant, with the hulking woman down beneath him, working hard, his own hands gripping something, his muscles tense, his mind pinwheeling: yes, indeed. He smiled.

“Round the world, baby? Only feefty more dollar?”

“No. Oh, uh, no, I don’t think so,” Trewitt said dreamily.

“Come on, baby. We can have some more fun.”

“Ah. I don’t think so. I appreciate it, I really do. I just don’t think so.”

“Sure, baby. It’s your money.”

She retrieved her underpants and pulled the dress over her head and there she was, presto chango, the old Anita. It was as if nothing had happened, and he realized that for her nothing had.

He pulled up his pants, tucked in his shirt, and fastened his belt.

“Ten dollars, baby.”

“Ten dollars! I already paid. Hey, I paid you a fair amount!”

“Rent, baby. You gotta rent the room. Is not free, nothing free. For the towel, the clean sheets” — yeah, fresh out of the dryer sometime in 1968 — “It’s for the big boss. He beat me up if I don’t get it.”

What was the difference? But this was costing a fortune. He was counting it out in ones when he heard the siren.

He raced down the steps two at a time, almost spilling out of control at the end as he lurched into the now-empty bar. The boy Roberto quietly polished glasses and nearby Oscar Meza sat at a table talking with a bulky policeman in a crisp tan uniform with a yellow tie — yes, yellow, canary yellow, screeching yellow — whose beefy shoulder was looped with a final ludicrous touch, a gold braid.

Trewitt tried to gain command of himself, but the cop looked over to fix him with a set of dead eyes.

Trewitt smiled casually, and tried to shuffle out.

He heard the word gringo, and the two men broke into laughter.

Trewitt reached the door and stepped into the night. He could see nothing except the railroad tracks beyond the street and beyond that, Oscar’s competition, the Casa de Jason, another nightclub. Trewitt descended the steeply pitched parking lot to street level and turned. Five hundred yards ahead, beyond an arcade of canopied shops adjacent to the railroad tracks, lay the border; he could see it in lurid light, and the beggars and cabdrivers collecting there, a cruel, high fence, a traffic jam, booths, and a fortresslike bridge of offices overhead. He could see no flag; but, beyond the fence, he saw something perhaps more emblematic: the golden arches of McDonald’s.