Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller Page A

in a magazine a while back.”
    Jesús-on-the-dashboard, talk about nutty stuff, talk about crazy. Danny could see it all: him driving, Luz sitting on an assassin’s lap, while three inches behind the driver was an insane ocelot, and all of them heading toward a cemetery Danny didn’t want to visit in the first place.
    Still, he understood the shooter’s point. “Probably want thousands of dollars for it. Five, ten thousand, I really don’t know. Not only do zoos love ’em, but fancy ladies covet ocelot coats.”
    “I don’t have that much extra money with me. How long does it take to get money down here by wire?”
    “Hard to say. Two days, a week, maybe, for the kind of money you’re talking about. Start transferring that much and everybody gets interested, including the DEA in the United States. They all figure you’re dealing dope.”
    The shooter lay back in his seat, face clenched and hard. “Let’s roll.”
    “It’s a tough world,” Danny said, shifting gears, getting back up on the pavement. “Ever been to a bullfight? That’s something else all over again, a ceremony about death, about the control of man over an animal.”
    “No. I refuse to go.” The shooter was still looking straight ahead, lips almost closed while he talked. “But it gets worse than bullfights. Ever hear of the sanguinary fiestas populares? Translates as ’bloody festivals.’ Have them in Spain all the time. I saw one once. Couldn’t believe it.”
    “Can’t say I have.”
    “There’re different versions of it, depending on the place and the fiesta in progress. One version, one they like in Coria, is where a bull is set free in a street. People try to put out its eyes with steel-tipped darts, the literal version of a bull’s-eye. Clever, huh? After a while the bull is full of darts, stuck in him every which way and all over and staggering around.
    “Then the crowd starts torturing him, beating on him and pulling his tail and stabbing him with metal spikes that have barbs on them. Finally the bull is killed and castrated. When that’s done, the fun seekers—and we’re talking men,
    women, and children—smear themselves with its blood. The climax is parading the poor sonuvabitch’s testicles around town as part of the celebration. Other versions involve dwarves or clowns mocking the real bullfights by using calves. It’s torture, pure and simple. I like most Spanish and Mexican people I meet, but I’ve never understood the way some of them treat animals, particularly when all of that shit is done under the heading of religion, which it often is. Hell, in Spain even the local priests come out to bless the affair. Maybe they do here, for all I know.”
    “Well, we hang ’em up and slit their throats in packing houses,” Danny said. “Hunt ’em down with high-power rifles. See any difference?”
    “I see a big difference, but I don’t much like that, either. Hunted animals when I was a kid, don’t anymore. Got this notion of parallel civilizations in my head. Has to do with the equality of living things… all things… rocks and trees and ocelots and bulls and humans, learning to love the snake as much as you love the butterfly. Not sure when I started thinking like that.”
    He paused, looking out the side window. “Ah, to hell with it all.”
    Danny felt like mentioning the dogfights and cockfights and animal mutilations that still went on in the States, but he could see the shooter was in a nasty mood and left him alone with his contradictions.
    On the edge of Ceylaya, the shooter and Danny sat in the Bronco while Luz walked up a long hill to the cemetery. Flies everywhere and hot wind and a young boy driving a herd of cattle past them along the road. They swatted flies while the shooter watched Luz through the heat waves. After a while, saying nothing, he got out and followed her.
    In central Mexico’s hottest time of the year, the sun was a laser and beat upon him as he climbed the hill. Danny watched