The Ultimate Good Luck Read Free Page B

have just had me off. What does that shitty tattoo say on your arm?”
    “Good conduct,”
Quinn said. “It’s supposed to keep me out of trouble. But it doesn’t work.”
    “Well I think you’re an asshole,” she said. “Only asshole trash have tattoos. You and your fucking muscles.”
    “Why don’t you go back down the hill?” he said. “I’ll get up and drive you.” He thought he could win back an hour or two if she was gone.
    “Just forget it,” she said, and slid back down under the covers.
    He didn’t understand why the girl said she was Italian. Maybe it just made her happy. Maybe she thought she had missed somethingsomewhere. She was just a bad idea, that’s all. But she’d be gone and she was just paying him back for the fights and for being on the skids in a town where she didn’t know anybody. Somebody had to pay for that offense. And he didn’t mind, if it gave her a lift. It could be a gift he gave her.

2
    T HERE WERE PLENTY of edifying stories about the Oaxaca prisión. As many as there were parts of the body to get interested in. They began, once you told them, to have the appeal of dirty limericks. Each one was worse than the one before, but you kept listening indefinitely because of the pacing. There was the one about the American jockey with the big crank who fucked every whore that stumbled up the road from Animas Trujano, and came down eventually with a burning that made his testicles swell up and burst before a doctor could get inside. There was the one Sonny told him on his first visitor’s day about the kid from Beloit with an earache who died in two hours when whatever it was in his ear made connection with his brain. People committed suicide with crochet needles. The
mayores
in the “F” barracks beheaded their boyfriends and left them in their beds for days. But the story that interested Quinn was the Austrian woman whose husband was doing years for holding ten Bolivian aspirins on a DC-3 bound for Cancun. The man was an appliance-store owner and wasn’t healthy, and his wife flew from Vienna and visited him every day. And every day the matrons in the women’s precinct submitted her to the most intimate personal searches. And after a while, Sonny said, the woman began to come twice a day, in the morning andduring siesta, when the matrons had more time, and then more often, until eventually the matrons got bored and wouldn’t search her unless she paid them. Otherwise they would pass her through to her husband. And the woman had long ago stopped being interested in him. It demonstrated, he thought, the way people adapted to circumstances when the circumstances went out of control. And it was in the spirit of things in Mexico. Mexico was like Vietnam or L.A., only more disappointing—a great trivial abundance of crap the chief effect of which wasn’t variety but sameness. And since you couldn’t remember the particulars from one day to the next, you couldn’t remember what to avoid and control. And the only consolation finally was that you didn’t have any stake in it, and Quinn didn’t figure to be around long enough to earn one.

    Bernhardt drove the car intently, as though something was troubling him. They were out near the prisión on the American Highway driving too fast in Bernhardt’s Mercedes. The morning had developed a painful opaline glare, and out behind, Oaxaca had scaled back flat in the distance, a matte plate of jacarandas and palmeras and square-roofed casitas and the pale double corona of the Santo Domingo Cathedral, the clear dreamy Mexican air diminishing everything. Mexican cities at a distance, Quinn believed, gave you a different illusion from American cities. They looked like dream oases, whereas American cities looked like disassembled nightmares, but the facts were reversed and American cities were better places when you got there.
    “Last night we have a large cocaine interception at the airport,” Bernhardt said. He looked concerned, as