The Ultimate Good Luck Read Free

and not his,and she wanted to put it right. She took off her clothes in the living room without talking, took a lude, then got on her knees beside the davenport and licked him down his legs and up his chest and his arms and blew him in an expert way that made him come fast. She drank some mescal out of a bottle in her bolsa and took a crossroads, then walked him into the bedroom as though the house was hers and turned on the lights and sat on the side of the bed and looked like she wanted to apologize for something. She was a smaller girl with her clothes off, with turned-up breasts and thin legs. Her hair seemed thicker in the light, and when he got in bed with her she climbed on him and fucked him until she worked herself down into her pill and the mescal, down below whatever she’d seen in the boxing ring that was making her want to apologize. It hadn’t been what she bargained for, but he thought she was the kind of girl who made the most of things, and he admired her for it, though he had lost any philosophy that made it possible to feel sorry for her. When she was finished, she got off him and went to the bathroom, and came back with a wet cloth and wiped it over his legs, and in a little while she lay back on the pillow in the light and went to sleep.
    At two o’clock he got out of bed, turned off the light and did pushups till his arms ached, then walked out onto the walled patio where he could see the city against the black Sierra and breathe the bougainvillea. In the war, this was scrounge time, when things got dicey. The incomings wasted you out of sleep, slammed your face in the dirt, clawing the deck for a flak vest and helmet. He didn’t want to be asleep at two o’clock anymore. He preferred to be alert to whatever there was to hear. The bungalow sat on a long, eucalyptus-shaded hill that humped back toward the big mountains north of town. It was the suburbs. Americans rented there because the bungalows were cheap and neat and had grassy lawns and no deposits were taken. But he didn’t know the American girls next door, and now that Rae was coming with the money, and the hard part was done and Sonny was coming out, he wouldn’t have the chance. He had begun, in a month of waiting and passingthrough offices and anterooms, and seven months living alone, to feel like he was losing a freedom of some kind, getting cautious without any gain back in precision. Bernhardt said it was the American experience abroad, the long decline in expectation until you could see the immediate world like a native, but without the native’s freedom. It should be a great unburdening, Bernhardt said, but to Americans it was always a hardship. Bernhardt thought Americans thrived on protecting privileges nobody else would ever want. Bernhardt liked explanations. It was a lawyer’s vice.
    Oaxaca sparkled like a matrix of platinum sequins laid over velvet. The dark played out into the valley south toward Chiapas, so that where the land stopped and the sky began was a boundary lost to sight. He counted landmarks every night. The pink rotator on the airport tower, the blue Corona Cerveza on Bustamante, the hollow lights that shone all night on the cathedral opposite the zócalo, and the red Pepsi script shimmering far out in the Mixtec barrios beyond the river. There was never a sense of intimacy. The town seemed to function practically in the visible distance, though the empty air in between became enticing and silent and still. The American Highway curled down the mountains, split, circled the city two ways, then reunited, and the only detectable movement there was the lights of an overland truck gearing down before flatting out into the valley. Americans were off the road hours ago. The trucks and the Dinas would blink their lights, then run you off the cliffsides.
    Quinn thought when you hung out in the present, which he did, you slipped free of the past, though not the future, and all the anxieties came in at higher calibers. It