NIGHT CRUISING Read online

  "Where are we going?"

  Cruise blinked, startled from reverie. Lost in his thoughts, he'd forgotten about Molly and her gee-whiz chatter. "A town I know. It's better than Juarez."

  "Is it far?" Molly peered out the open window at the dark desert reaches that bounded the rutted highway.

  "Another thirty miles or so. Not far."

  She must have picked up on his mood. She sat quietly without asking more questions while the night wind blew through the car and the headlights pierced the ultimate darkness ahead. Vehicles did not travel this road from Juarez. It was too dangerous to enter Ramirez's territory without a standing invitation. Molly wouldn't have seen them, but Cruise knew they had passed a patrol point a couple of miles back. Just at a turn in the road there was a bank of land hiding men with binoculars. They scanned passing traffic. Armed with rifles fitted with night-scopes, had they not recognized Cruise's looks-the long hair, beard, and mustache--and his signal--a blink of his headlights to dim and then back to high--he wouldn't have been allowed passage.

  This lonely dark stretch of highway reminded Cruise of Arkansas country roads in his youth. No streetlights or houses, just vast black walls bounding either side of the roadway. You might be lost on the dark side of the moon and never find your way home again. He didn't drive those roads, though, when he was a boy. By the time he owned a car, they had been paved, and there were houses and mobile homes to relieve the monotony of night. When he was small he plodded down those roads alone, the chill air buffeting him. There were all sorts of monsters that lurked beyond the safe roadbed, and he imagined they snarled and fought to get to him.

  His father made him walk six miles, at night, always at night when it was most frightening for young minds, to his aunt's house on errands. Cruise, after a time, realized these enforced marches were meant for other than to fetch a cup of sugar for his mother or a screwdriver for his father. They were punishments of the sort only his father could devise. Sometimes he let Cruise's sister, Lannie, walk with him. But more often than not he was forced to go alone and battle the fear without help.

  When Lannie accompanied him, Cruise used her for a sounding board in order to puzzle out the reasons his family behaved as they did. "We don't really need vanilla extract tonight, do we?" he'd ask, trying to find out if Lannie understood what was happening. "I mean, Mama's not baking a cake or anything. She's not even cooking tonight."

  "We have to get the vanilla," Lannie said. "Daddy said so."

  "Well, I know we have to get it, but we don't need it, do we?"

  "We do if we don't want a whipping."

  "So we have to walk twelve miles round-trip in the dark, in the cold, just so we won't be whipped." He couldn't make it any more crystal-clear to her than that.

  "Shut up and let's just walk faster."

  "Lannie, do you love them?"

  "Who?"

  She sounded like an owl. Whooo. Whooo. "You know who."

  "I don't care," she said. She strode ahead of him and he had to rush to catch up before she was lost in the dark.

  "But do you love them?" he persisted.

  "They're nuts."

  "I know that, but..."

  "Shut up and walk faster. I have homework to finish when we get back."

  "Lannie, why does he hate us so much?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why don't we run away?"

  She stopped in the roadbed and grabbed him by the arms to shake him. She was taller than he, though he was a year older. In another two years he would experience a growth spurt and be as tall as his father. "Don't say that again! He'd kill you if you ran away. Don't even say it." She let him go and he could hear her sniffling back tears.

  "Besides, where would we go? We don't have nowhere to go."

  Well, that was true if nothing else. His aunt, whose house they were sent to on errands, was much older than his father, so old she smelled like the handkerchiefs pressed for years between the pages of a Bible. She lived alone, an old widow, and she wasn't quite right in the head, either. She thought Lannie was Mama and he was Daddy; she never got their names right. Senile, his mother told him once, but he didn't know what that was. To him she was just wrong-headed and lost and lonely. It always took her the longest time to find whatever it was they had come to borrow. "A flashlight? I think there's one beneath the bed. No? Then let's look in the attic. No? My land, it must be in the kitchen, look under the sink, it's probably there."

  He hadn't any other relatives that he knew about--none he could run to. They didn't have friends, not his family, and they didn't go to church or social functions so he knew no one to help or advise him. If he told the teachers at school that his father beat them mercilessly over the smallest infraction, they would have taken him away, but he had heard where children went who were torn from the bosom of their families. They went to institutions and they were made orphans. Terrible, terrible words. What choice was that, and how could he run from one hellhole to another if he had any sense?

  The night breeze rustled the leaves of the trees that pressed up to the ditches lining the roadbed. He heard a whispering sound, like many voices repeating a phrase. Cruise shivered, thinking the leaves were voices of demons lying in wait for two children hurrying and stumbling through the darkness. He knew what they must look like, those demons, with their monster teeth and claws and tails that whipped behind them like snakes. He had never glimpsed them as much as he stared into the dark to see the evidence of his fear, but he knew they were scary, they were truly the stuff of nightmares. Despite the fact his family were not churchgoers, he had read parts of the Bible. He knew about these things.

  "Lannie? What are you going to be when you grow up?"

  If she'd only talk to him, he wouldn't have to think about the monsters in the trees.

  She rushed ahead again and he had to run to catch her.

  "Lannie?"

  "I'm going to be a country singer," she said. "Like Tammy Wynette. I'm gonna have a big house in Memphis and drive a fancy convertible car."

  "But you can't sing."

  "Yes, I can. You just never heard me, that's all. I sing by myself."

  "Sing for me, Lannie. Go ahead, I'd like to hear you sing, please?"

  She sang then, and her voice stopped Cruise in his tracks. She halted, feeling with her hands in the dark for him. She held onto his arms and he couldn't even see her face, but he heard her soft, melodic voice, and it filled him with a longing he could not name. It was a church hymn, "Amazing Grace," and it was sung by an angel on her knees before the throne of God. It made him ache. It made him cry.

  "...how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me..."

  It made him lift his hands and grip her elbows to keep her from ascending to heaven. Oh, Lannie, he thought, hoping her voice would never stop. Oh, Lannie you do sing, you do!

  When she finished and let him go, she turned and hurried away. When he could get hold of his emotions, he ran as fast as he could. He reached for the back of her shirt to stop her. "That was..." He was out of breath. "That was...was...great."

  "Stupid," she said.

  "No, it was wonderful. You can be Tammy Wynette when you grow up, I know you can."

  "I can be nothing. I am nothing. And if you tell that I sang a song, I'll kill you. I'll tell Daddy to kill you, then I'll help him bury you in a deep grave where the worms will eat off your face. Now c'mon. We're almost there. I've got homework to do when we get home."

  Dreams that die. Cruise knew all about those. That's why he knew what was going to happen to the screenwriter in Hollywood who cut his own throat. Lannie might as well have cut hers, same difference. She left home at sixteen with a boy who had joined the Army. After six years and five babies, he left her to raise them on her own. She worked in a sewing factory in Arizona making curtains until her hands were scarred, her back bent, her eyes dim and bespectacled. She never sang. She never bought a house in Memphis. The angelic voice that made him soar died with her childhood and couldn't b
e reborn. It was interred in the country roads and woods and black nights where they grew up.

  Lannie had been the single child of nine children who had any sort of artistic talent at all. That she put it away and let it die made him hate her more than any of the others. If he had had a voice like that, he'd have been a different man. Lannie could have been a different woman, yet she threw it away, hid it until it shriveled from lack of light, and she got exactly what she deserved. A non-life. A dull, dishwater death-in-life just like the one she had left behind. Though now she took care of their elderly father, he could not forgive her for having lacked the courage to pursue another path.

  He had courage. He had embraced the nomad life and lived by the death of others, the way Lannie might have lived had she not killed her own dream. Let his sisters and brothers think their "normal" lives more honorable than his. They were as deluded as his senile old aunt had been, stuck in memories of the past.

  He was the only one to escape. The rest of them simply took up the threads of the same lives they had led in childhood. Beaten. Degraded. Deadening.

  "Cockroaches," he whispered.

  "What?" Molly asked. "Did you say something?"

  He shook his head, cleared his throat of the tightness that had come there from thinking about Lannie. "Nothing," he said. "Look." He pointed ahead. ."That's where we're going."

  "It looks like an oasis out in the middle of nowhere." Colored lights shimmered in the near distance against a black background.

  "It is. You'll like it."

  He slowed as he drove down the main street. Here the people were not so frantic as they were in Juarez, although the streets were full of pedestrians, people on bicycles, and the clubs were packed. But the lights were dimmer, the neon less, the shadows thicker. Men strolled the wide sidewalks arm in arm with their women. From open-air cantinas drifted happy, finger-snapping music. The smell of enchiladas, beans, corn tortillas, and roasting meats came through the car windows and made Cruise's mouth water. He had eaten truck-stop food for so long, he couldn't remember what real food tasted like.

  "It looks nice," Molly said. "Smells good too."

  "After we take our stuff up to our rooms at the El Presidente, I'll take you exploring and we'll get something to eat."

  Some men waved and called, Hey, amigo! to Cruise as he drove past them. Others, knowing and fearing his lethal purpose, turned their eyes away and scurried deeper into the shadows.

  Cruise waved back and wondered which ones would find their deaths at his hands tonight. He hadn't been here in over six months. Ramirez would surely need his services right away.

  "This looks much better than Juarez," Molly said.

  He knew she'd like it.

  #

  The El Presidente Hotel would not have been out of place among the high-priced accommodations strewn along the aqua coast of Acapulco or Cozumel. Wide marble steps led up to shining glass doors with brass handles. A doorman in braided uniform and crisp tulip red cap nodded deferentially. He ushered them inside the sumptuous lobby. Gold-leaf-decorated moldings ran along the eighteen-foot ceilings. A gargantuan chandelier that might have better graced a palace hung ablaze over the center of the carpeted area. Gleaming wood adorned the service desk, and a brass rail ran along its foot. Deep red leather club chairs and sofas were arranged tastefully, though they stood empty.

  Unlike other beautiful hotels in Mexico, this one was not meant for the entertainment of touristas. The El Presidente was owned by Adolpho Ramirez, and it was where he lived in the penthouse suite. His men, guests, and buyers occupied the lower floors.

  Cruise saw how impressed Molly looked as he led her to the desk to secure a room key. Had she ever been in nice hotels? He thought not. "You'll tell Adolpho I'm here?" Cruise asked as he took possession of the key to his usual luxury suite.

  "Si, senor."

  "Good. And I'd like another room for my friend."

  The desk man wore a black suit, white shirt, and his teeth shone brilliantly from his dark face when he smiled, rather like a shark sensing prey. "Surely," he said, handing over a second passkey with a flourish.

  Cruise installed Molly in her room. "Relax for a while. I have some business to attend to, and then we'll go out.',

  "This is some hotel," she said, slinging her carryall bag into a white satin chair. "I guess the owner's your friend, huh?"

  "Yeah, I know him. I come through here when I cross the country sometimes. It beats sleeping in the car in truck stops," he said. "I'll be back soon to check on you."

  He was back in twenty minutes having gotten the name and whereabouts of the one traitor Ramirez felt he must be rid of. Molly was still in the bath. Her second one in a few hours. She was not used to going without bathing as he was after years of living on the road. He heard the water being turned off. The water pipes gurgled and thumped. He took a seat on the bed to wait. With his foot he pushed around Molly's jeans where she'd left them in a pile on the floor. When she emerged, dressed, hair wrapped in a towel, she started at seeing him. "Back already! I'm almost through."

  "No hurry. Take your time."

  Ignoring that, she hurried to the dressing table and whipped the turbaned towel from her head. She fluffed out the crinkly ringlets with her fingers as he watched.

  Nervous, he thought. I'm on her bed, invading her space. She thinks I'll make a pass.

  He stood and took the chair, crossing his legs while he watched her.

  "You saw your friend?" she asked.

  "I saw him,"

  "He must run this town."

  "What makes you think that?"

  "I don't know. It's not a tourist town, I can see that. And your friend owns this big hotel..." She swept her arm around at her surroundings for emphasis. She glanced at him in the mirror while applying lipstick.

  Cruise didn't answer her. She wasn't going to know everything, not about this place, no matter how many questions she asked.

  "Okay." She turned to him and gave a tentative smile. "I'm ready to go out again. That was my second shower tonight. Making up for those days without one. My hair might get clean yet."

  "You're not sleepy?" It was close to midnight.

  She shook her head. "I'm getting used to the night. With so much going on, how could I sleep now?"

  He went to the door and let her follow behind. In the empty elevator to the lobby he said, "You smell like baby powder."

  She stared at the elevator doors. "My deodorant. Secret."

  "It's a secret?"

  "No, that's what kind it is. Baby powder scent."

  "It's nice. Better than perfume."

  The doors opened and they stepped into the deserted lobby. Even the desk attendant was missing. Only the doorman stood watch, opening the door for them before they were close enough to touch the door handles. He bowed deeply as they went past.

  "Let's walk," Cruise said, going down the steps.

  The hotel was the center architectural triumph of the small town. It dwarfed other buildings, most of which were one-story native affairs made of stucco and thick tarry timbers. Cruise headed for the cantina where his target was supposed to be carousing, unaware he had been marked for assassination. It was but two blocks away. Overhead the sky spun with stars, and the sickle moon rode high over the world. Women dressed in revealing clothing and wearing plenty of eye makeup suggestively jostled against Cruise as he and Molly maneuvered the busy sidewalks to the cantina. Men catcalled and reached out toward Molly's red hair as she passed them. She shrunk closer to Cruise. He put an arm around her shoulders and she gave a little shudder.

  "They won't bother you," he said. 'It's your red hair they find interesting."

  He thought he heard Molly humming below her breath, perhaps just to calm herself. He bypassed the cantina where the man he searched for was supposed to be, and stopped at the next food place where small round wrought-iron tables were set out on the sidewalk. A string of Christmas lights swung from poles anchored at the corners of the outdoor cafe
. He gestured Molly toward the nearest empty table. "Wait here a minute. I'll be right back. Order a Coke. Here." He took out his wallet and gave her a ten-dollar bill. He'd have more soon. "Buy whatever you want. You look hungry."

  "Where are you going?" She looked around at the couples at the other tables, and at the men swarming around the cafe as they moved in waves up and down the street. Two of them kissed the air in her direction and said something in Spanish.

  "Stay here," he admonished, leaving her. "You'll be okay, you'll be fine."

  He backtracked to the cantina and once inside, stood rock still to survey the assemblage. Four men played a game of billiards at the pool table. Others sat in shadowed booths, speaking in soft voices to their women. He grabbed the arm of a woman waiting tables. The beer bottles trembled on the brown serving tray she carried in the other hand. "Senor Cruise!"

  He spoke to her in Spanish. "Which one is Riaro?"

  "At the back, the one standing next to the jukebox."

  A gorgeously colored antique Rockola stood at the back, loudly playing Mexican records. Lime-green and popsicle-orange tubes pumped color up and down the front of the machine. Cruise moved to it. He singled out Riaro, edging another man aside, and said, "you know me?"

  Jesus Riaro cringed from the man who was a gringo legend in Ramirez's town. Avenging Angel, they called him when he wasn't around to hear. "Si," Riaro said cautiously. He looked around, wondering why he was so favored with the gringo's attention. He noticed everyone else moving slowly away. He broke out in an instant white hot sweat. He wiped down his face with a blue bandanna he carried in his back pocket.

  "I brought a girl here. Little gringa. red hair. Young. You want her?"

  "Oh!" So that was it. He wasn't in any trouble; no one knew about the coke he was now addicted to and forced to pilfer from his boss. Cruise sometimes sold his little friends he brought along on his visits.